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This Tuesday morning, the Firminy market (Loire) slowly wakes up and welcomes its first customers. “To say that a few meters away from us the city hospital is overwhelmed”, breathes Colette, a 71-year-old former nurse, who has come to fill her basket with beets and other seasonal vegetables. Not only is the main topic of discussion here the Covid-19 outbreak, but everyone knows someone who has been affected. “My sister-in-law,” Christelle said. “My son-in-law and my nephew,” says Noelle. “My wife and I! I suffered everywhere, it was horrible,” sums up 73-year-old Georges, a former trader who has a hard time not squeezing a few ladles.
The small town, until now known for hosting the largest architectural site of Le Corbusier, has emerged as one of the most affected municipalities in France. Its proximity – less than fifteen kilometers – with Saint-Etienne, the capital of the Loire, is not for nothing. The department is shared with the Haute-Loire and Savoy, all in the Rhône-Alpes, the epicenter of the epidemic. The incidence is over 1,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, more than double the national average. “Like the East during the first wave, we are in the spotlight, we did not expect it and we would do without it”, sighs Christelle, a forty-year-old who blames an uneven application of gestures. fence. To the producer of fresh goats, another inhabitant makes her hypothesis: “For me it is Steel, it has led to a huge mixing of the population. “
In one week 150,000 people in the new shopping center
Silent from confinement, steel is a steel giant in Saint-Etienne, with 1,600 parking spaces and 70,000 square meters of shops and restaurants. This mall is open-air, airy, lined with walkways, sculptures, and fountains. But above all it is new. Its inauguration was held on September 16. A week later, more than 150,000 people had already rushed there. “We had to postpone! A third of the population of the basin in a few days, Sunday an exceptional opening… of course it was bad ”, we grumble among the nursing staff of the private hospital of the Loire.
“It is one element, but it does not explain everything”, nuance Dr. Jean-Yves Grall, head of the Regional Health Agency of the Rhône-Alpes. For him, the dizzying increase in the epidemic (in a month, between 1 October and 1 November, the incidence in the region went from 194 to 856, and in the department from 316 to 1,128) is “multifactorial”. , the significant share of people in a precarious situation.
“The next two weeks will be difficult to overcome”
“In the Loire, the rate of elderly people is higher than in the region as a whole,” notes Dr. Grall. The return to school inside and outside the university also played a role… ”, he continues with a barely veiled reference to student meetings. In early October, an evening with 150 revelers literally turned into a cluster, forcing a business school to close in the face of widespread cases. A number of family events are added to the list, such as large commission weddings, scheduled for spring and finally celebrated in September.
If knowing the causes to better anticipate what will happen next is essential, here as elsewhere there is a factor of “bad luck” to take into consideration. Witness the Savoy, where the numbers are crazy. “The territories most spared by the first wave are less so by the second. The west also turns red ”, decodes the director of the ARS. His current compass, always having a hundred resuscitation beds “in advance”, to ensure the influx of patients – “We do everything we can not to be saturated,” he assures us. For this you have to stay calm. “It will have to stay that way a little longer: if you feel a slight tremor this week,” there is little objective evidence to say it is going down. The next two weeks will be difficult to get through. “
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