France Seen Facing 5,000 More Deaths in May as Lockdown Eases

(Bloomberg) --

France’s tentative exit from lockdown will probably allow coronavirus infections to rebound, leading to more than 150,000 new cases and 5,000 deaths this month, according to researchers at the business school Insead.

As restrictions ease and the virus circulates more actively, the number of new Covid-19 cases will likely start rising again, Insead’s Phebo Wibbens and two colleagues said in a report. To bring new daily infection numbers to just 100, France would have needed to prolong its lockdown by three months, according to their statistical model.

European countries have been pulling back on confinement measures as the coronavirus toll has fallen, yet France still has reported between 400 and 500 new cases over the past two days. Extending France’s lockdown that ended Monday by three months would take limitations on business and social activities into mid-August.

“The French lockdown worked fairly well,” Wibbens said by phone. But “it’s extremely uncertain what will happen when we ease the lockdown. This is just a big test.”

The true number of Covid-19 cases for France is probably around 2.1 million, Wibbens and his colleagues estimated, compared with a reported count of about 213,000 cases. They pegged the number of cases to near 20 million for the eight most affected countries excluding China.

The Insead professors’ statistical model assumes a mortality rate of about 1% for the new virus, and works back from the number of reported deaths to reconstruct an estimated number of cases. That means that the infection count for a given day is about 100 times the death count on the same day two or three weeks later, they said.

The findings suggest that eradicating Covid-19 through social distancing “is not even a distant aspiration, it’s a statistical impossibility,” the researchers said in a statement.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.