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The announcement had already been made on Tuesday evening by Emmanuel Macron. This was confirmed this Thursday by Jean Castex: the restaurants will not be able to reopen before January 20. On the sole condition that “the holiday period at the end of the year does not translate into a resumption of the epidemic”, warned the premier. To justify this choice, the government explained that “scientific studies show that these institutions, despite demanding health protocols […] they remain and will remain places of contamination “.
What studies are we talking about?
Matignon and the Ministry of Health did not respond to our requests, so we looked at two recently published studies. The first, which dates back to early September, was conducted by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) in 11 US states with a sample of 314 symptomatic people who had a PCR test.
Result: after the investigation, in the two weeks before the first symptoms appeared, positive cases were twice as likely to have gone to a restaurant as negative cases. Ditto for the bars. Results to be tempered, however: the limited number of people followed on the one hand, and the fact that the participants are volunteers, therefore not necessarily representative of the American population.
Another more recent study was conducted by American researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities. Published November 10 in the scientific journal “Nature” (link in English), it is based on the movements of 98 million inhabitants of 10 metropolitan areas of the United States thanks to the tracking of their smartphones.
What does it show? After reviewing the data, the researchers concluded that 85 percent of the predictable infections in Chicago, for example, came from just 10 percent of public places. And among these places, restaurants are the main source of contamination, in front of buildings, bars, hotels … and far away in front of shops.
A study published by Nature relies on geolocation data from 98 million individuals to determine the places where we contaminate the +. Verdict? Restaurants, bars and sports halls may have to remain closed for a long time … https://t.co/IRuAuniea5 pic.twitter.com/S5DuxkXVsp
– fipaddict (@fipaddict) November 11, 2020
But even here there are negative sides: the study, conducted between March and May in the United States, obviously does not take into account the measures implemented in France with the health protocol strengthened in restaurants.
What do scientists think?
For many health professionals, this latest study shows the obvious: Restaurants are hotbeds of risk. “This seems, unfortunately, quite logical, according to infectious disease specialist Benjamin Davido, interviewed by Le Parisien. It is in places where you don’t wear a mask that you are most contaminated”.
The study published in “Nature” also highlights the fact that you stay longer in a restaurant or bar and the density of people. For the authors, opening restaurants at 20% of their capacity would only lead to 6% more infections.
“If we gradually reopen the gates, we must reopen these factories last”
“This work is particularly precise and adheres to numerous observational studies”, observes Vittoria Colizza, with Le Figaro. For this model specialist and director of research at Inserm, “the environments in which it is impossible to maintain social distances are those that present the greatest risks”.
For Mahmoud Zureik, professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin, restaurants pose several problems: “limited surface area”, prohibition of wearing a mask, not ideal ventilation. “You can be contaminated anywhere, he admits to the world. But in bars and restaurants the proportionality of the risk is greater”. For this specialist, from a health point of view, “the closure of bars and restaurants is justified. If we gradually reopen the valves, we must reopen these places last”.
We recall, on October 17, that the health protocol of restaurants was tightened to reduce the spread of the virus in closed places as much as possible: no more than six guests at the table, space of at least one meter between the chairs of the different tables. , setting up a “reminder” and wearing the mask up to the first course and between services.
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