Politique Internationale — The Covid 19 health crisis began precisely five years ago. Does that seem a long time ago to you, or is it still quite recent?
Arnaud Fontanet — If we listen to the French, we find that they have a great capacity for forgetting! January 2020 saw the start of one of the most serious health crises the world has ever seen, a unique pandemic, and yet hardly anyone talks about it any more. Personally, I can forget it all the less since I continue to work on this episode. Because there are always things we need to understand better, and the most important thing is to learn from the near past, to gather as much information as possible so that we can prepare ourselves, if necessary, to face a new crisis.
P. I. — Specifically, if another crisis were to break out today, would we be in a better position to resist?
A. F. — Without question, yes. For the simple reason that, during the pandemic, we were able to develop and test new tools. In particular, we made considerable progress in the field of vaccines. Certainly, there were teams that had been working on messenger RNA vaccines for fifteen years, but it took just one week to adapt them to SARS- CoV-2 once the virus sequence had been published, and two months to test their efficacy and tolerance in humans. Progress has also been made in the field of diagnostic tests. Remember that in 2022, when the Omicron variant began to circulate, one million tests were being carried out every day in France, half of them self-tests. Finally, with Paxlovid, we now have a real treatment for Covid, aimed at the elderly population, people with co-morbidities or those with severe immunodeficiency. In addition to these tools, extensive studies have been carried out into the impact of behavioural changes.
P. I. — What behaviours were weighed up?
A. F. — The scale of the crisis has enabled us to carry out an unprecedented analysis of the effects of social distancing, given its depth. We can now say that containment reduced the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 by 70%. For curfews, it was 20% to 35%, depending on the time of day. Other measures, such as closing public places and teleworking, represent around 20%. All these duly quantified findings are invaluable.
P. I. — So we’re better prepared in the event of another pandemic, but are some people better armed than others?
A. F. — Another major lesson is that the earlier the risk is managed – the earlier the response is orchestrated – the more effective we will be. During Covid, the Scandinavian countries proved the virtues of this strategy of anticipation, which not only saves lives but also preserves the economy. Denmark is a case in point: on 11 March 2020, while the hospitals were still empty, the Prime Minister went on television to announce the systematisation – as far as possible – of teleworking, and the …