On March 11, 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described Covid-19 as a pandemic for the first time. In three years, the disease has taken hold in the landscape, even though most of the stigmata of this strange period of confinements, curfews and isolations have disappeared from the public space.
If masks are still observed on some faces in public transport and health establishments, most screening tents have disappeared from the sidewalks, vaccination centers have left municipal halls and self-tests no longer make up gondola heads. pharmacies. The vaccination pass is no longer required at the entrance to a public place and primary vaccination is no longer even recommended by the High Authority for Health (HAS).
The trivialization of the infection is obvious. It’s as if the government’s self-fulfilling prophecy, “living with the virus”, had finally come true. This mantra repeated at will by the various ministers and imposed by Emmanuel Macron was first used to justify a strategy opposed to “zero Covid”, adopted by certain countries such as China, then to accompany the restrictive measures guiding the deconfinement process for the first two years. In 2022, the expression has again taken on a different coloring. When the population was overwhelmed by the Omicron tidal wave (more than 365,000 infections per day as of January 24, 2022), the need to “live with it” was imposed on all. And it was paradoxically when the contamination remained very strong that the restrictive measures began to be lifted.
The end of the obligation to wear a mask in public places, businesses and schools was announced on March 3, 2022, when nearly 52,000 people were catching the virus every day. In comparison, during the second confinement, from October 30 to December 15, 2020, the peak had barely exceeded 48,000 cases per day.
The difference between these two periods is that nearly 60% of the population had received at least three doses of vaccine. Since the law of July 30, 2022 ending the exceptional regimes governing the health management of the epidemic, two additional waves have resulted in the death of more than 12,000 people in France.
“Mobilization is decreasing”
“We realized that the population adapts to the indicators: when the incidence drops, we stop protecting ourselves. And this trivialization of risk is accelerating over time; with each wave, cognitive and behavioral mobilization decreases”, analyzes Jocelyn Raude, teacher-researcher in social psychology at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health (Ehesp). Including during the triple influenza-bronchiolitis-Covid-19 epidemic in the winter of 2022, the rise in practices such as wearing a mask in transport was very limited (+ 10%, according to the researcher).
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