The health authorities announced, on Wednesday, that the French capital is threatened by an influenza epidemic in the southwest, while bronchiolitis continues to spread in all regions. The number of influenza cases, such as hospitalizations, recorded the third consecutive weekly increase in the French capital last week, bringing the Occitanie region into a pre-pandemic phase, in short. In its publication issued by the French Public Health Agency.
It is the first metropolitan area to pass in this category, Réunion is already in this state and Mayotte is completely infected with the epidemic. Last winter, confinement and Covid barrier gestures helped prevent all viruses, including the flu. The French were less infected than usual and therefore less collectively immunized, which raises fears of an even stronger epidemic this year, as well as of other diseases such as gastroenteritis.
Bronchiolitis is also common in the West Indies
This phenomenon has already existed for weeks with bronchiolitis, a disease that mainly affects children. Common and highly contagious causing coughing, hard, rapid, wheezing and wheezing. Most of the time, it may require an emergency room visit or even hospitalization.
Since November, the epidemic of bronchiolitis has hit all areas of the metropolitan area, where it is currently continuing “at a high level”. Reunion and Guadeloupe have now been added. In the French capital, last week, “of the 5,577 children under the age of two seen in the emergency room for bronchiolitis (…), 5,077 (91%) were less than one year old, and 2,015 were transferred (36%) were hospitalized, the agency reports. “Of these, 1,893 (94%) were under one year old,” it says.