The health crisis has not yet said its last word. For the past few days, the number of positive cases for Covid-19 has stopped falling. Every day there are an average of 23,232 new cases, an increase of 30% compared to the previous week.

The other epidemiological indicators also seem to highlight a resumption of the epidemic:

The end of the wearing of masks and health restrictions and the return to a “normal” social life partly explains this epidemic resumption.

But it also seems to be caused by the arrival of two sub-variants of Omicron: BA.4 and BA.5. If they are not yet in the majority in France, they already are in many regions of France. In the slideshow below, find the 51 departments concerned.

These two sub-variants of Omicron were discovered in January 2022 in South Africa. In France, they represented only 18% of contaminations on June 2, 2022. “But we can go from 18% to 85% in two weeks”, alerted epidemiologist Catherine Hill, June 7 on BFMTV.

According to the scientists, BA.4 and BA.5 would be 10% more contagious than the Omicron BA.2 sub-variant, responsible for the epidemic resumption in April. Although they were at the origin of two new waves of the epidemic in South Africa and Portugal, they do not appear to be more dangerous than the BA.2 sub-variant.

In the Iberian Peninsula, “the hospital impact in terms of the number of patients in intensive care, the number of deaths or the number of hospitalizations was relatively low. Nothing to do with the previous waves,” said Frédéric Adnet, head of the emergency department at Avicenne hospital (Seine-Saint-Denis) at the microphone of BFMTV.