Mass testing, a new strategy to avoid a third wave of Covid-19?

To prevent a third wave of the Covid-19 epidemic and avoid alternating phases of decontamination and re-containment until the arrival of the vaccines, should we resort to large-scale screening? At the scale of a city, a region or even a country? The issue has re-emerged in France in recent weeks. On Thursday 26 November Olivier Véran opened the doors to a similar strategy at the population level. “We are studying the feasibility and above all the interest [d’opérations de] mass testing in some communities “, said the health minister.

“The challenge is to win the race against time against the virus, insists Philippe Froguel, a professor at Lille University Hospital and Imperial College London. Nothing is easy to control this pending vaccine epidemic, but there are solutions to be combined as quickly as possible, including “mass testing” [tests de masse] and surveys “, as in the case of England, which has been working since May to randomly examine samples of people every month. “The surgeon removes the tumor, in this case the containment, and then the chemotherapy is used to kill the last few cells, the”mass test“It’s part of this” chemo “”, it is pictorial the geneticist.

With nine other colleagues, he sent a note to the President of the Republic on 11 November, then a second to Olivier Véran, proposing to test the French population as widely as possible in two weeks, detecting the carriers of the virus within families. or groups of individuals to isolate themselves. “The goal is to drastically reduce cases pending vaccine stocks. [Ce dispositif] it will also make it possible to draw up a map of the prevalence of the virus in the French territories in order to adapt a territorial decontamination strategy “, they write.

To achieve this, they are asking for the green light for the generalization of saliva samples, which are currently only authorized by the High Authority for Health (HAS) for symptomatic people. And we recommend that you proceed according to the pooling method, up to samples of 10 people, consuming less resources and time than individual screening.

“With saliva samples and group tests, it’s doable on the French scale. With nasopharyngeal swabs and antigen tests, it’s more difficult because you need health workers who take the entire population, completes the epidemiologist Catherine Hill, who also signed the note. We lost a lot of time, this is the strategy that should have been adopted during or immediately after the first birth. We have to quickly test the entire French population by isolating the positives, there is no other solution, without it, we go straight to a third wave and a third confinement. ”

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