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Dès les premières semaines de l’épidémie de la Covid-19, en France, plusieurs voix se sont levées pour dire que l’heure n’était pas à la réflexion éthique, mais à l’action, en soulignant néanmoins l’importance d’un retour d’expérience à l’issue de l’urgence. Dans cette visée, le Centre d’éthique clinique de l’AP-HP a proposé, dès la fin du 1er confinement national, à des soignants, comme à des patients ou à des proches, de revenir, s’ils le souhaitaient, sur les questionnements ou les difficultés éthiques rencontrées pendant cette période (ce qu’il a appelé des « relectures éthiques »). Entre mai et septembre 2020, 31 professionnels y ont participé, 1 seul patient (médecin à la retraite) a été rencontré et aucun proche. Cet article souhaite partager la façon dont ces professionnels sont revenus, dans l’après-coup, sur les premiers mois de la crise. Plus d’une année plus tard, à l’heure où ce qui était « inhabituel » commence par devenir « ordinaire », et le « retour à la vie normale » semble à l’horizon, il n’est pas inutile de rappeler leurs réactions, leurs interrogations et leurs malaises. Au croisement des entretiens, c’est un questionnement quant à ce que soigner veut dire aujourd’hui et au rôle de la médecine en contexte de crise que l’on voit émerger. From the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in France, many argued that now was the time for action, not ethics, while acknowledging the need for feedback once the crisis had passed. To this end, the Parisian clinical ethics’ center suggested that health professionals, patients, and families come back on difficulties or questions they might have had during the first national lockdown once it was over. We called it ethical debriefs. Between May and September 2021, 31 professionals agreed to participate, but only 1 patient (a retired physician) and no proxy was met. The aim of this article is to share how these health professionals revisited the first months of the crisis. Indeed today, more than one year since Covid started and as what was once unusual is becoming common practice, it is useful not to forget how they reacted, what their questions were and where did their ethical difficulties lie at that time. Now that coming back to normal might be conceivable, all these interviews highlight the importance of a questioning on what caring for patients means nowadays, as well as on the definition of role of medicine in a context of crisis.

Even though much has been learned about the new pathogen SARS-CoV-2 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of uncertainty remains. In this paper we argue that what is important to know under uncertainty is whether harm accelerates and whether health policies achieve deceleration of harm. For this, we need to see cases in relation to diagnostic effort and not to look at indicators based on cases only, such as a number of widely used epidemiological indicators, including the reproduction number, do. To do so overlooks a crucial dimension, namely the fact that the best we can know about cases will depend on some welldefined strategy of diagnostic effort, such as testing in the case of COVID-19. We will present a newly developed indicator to observe harm, the acceleration index, which is essentially an elasticity of cases in relation to tests. We will discuss what efficiency of testing means and propose that the corresponding health policy goal should be to find ever fewer cases with an ever-greater diagnostic effort. Easy and low-threshold testing will also be a means to give back people’s sovereignty to lead their life in an “open” as opposed to “locked-down” society.

1st lines: In the upcoming European Council on July 17 and 18, EU member states will fight for a compromise on the European Commission’s main project to tackle the economic fallout of the Covid-19 crisis across Europe: a new 7-year EU budget propped up with a temporary Recovery Instrument (Next Generation EU) amounting to EUR 750 bn of jointly issued debt and to be passed on to EU countries as grants and loans. It is one of the most ambitious in a long line of proposals for European debt mutualisation. While joint borrowing can carry a lot of advantages, debt mutualisation has always been very controversial. Confrontations between those countries supposedly benefiting and losing from mutualising debt have repeatedly centered on the legitimate balance of solidarity and responsibility that such debt implies. Democratic legitimacy in solidarity-responsibility arrangements can be achieved when they can deliver in terms of output legitimacy (being effective in economic terms), input legitimacy (ensuring sufficient room for domestic politics in deciding national policy trajectories) and throughput legitimacy (being run in a transparent and accountable manner).

Uprising in China, the global COVID-19 epidemic soon started to spread out in Europe. As no medical treatment was available, it became urgent to design optimal non-pharmaceutical policies. With the help of a SIR model, we contrast two policies, one based on herd immunity (adopted by Sweden and the Netherlands), the other based on ICU capacity shortage. Both policies led to the danger of a second wave. Policy efficiency corresponds to the absence or limitation of a second wave. The aim of the paper is to measure the efficiency of these policies using statistical models and data. As a measure of efficiency, we propose the ratio of the size of two observed waves using a double sigmoid model coming from the biological growth literature. The Oxford data set provides a policy severity index together with observed number of cases and deaths. This severity index is used to illustrate the key features of national policies for ten European countries and to help for statistical inference. We estimate basic reproduction numbers, identify key moments of the epidemic and provide an instrument for comparing the two reported waves between January and October 2020. We reached the following conclusions. With a soft but long lasting policy, Sweden managed to master the first wave for cases thanks to a low R 0 , but at the cost of a large number of deaths compared to other Nordic countries and Denmark is taken as an example. We predict the failure of herd immunity policy for the Netherlands. We could not identify a clear sanitary policy for large European countries. What we observed was a lack of control for observed cases, but not for deaths.

Group testing is a screening strategy that involves dividing a population into several disjointed groups of subjects. In its simplest implementation, each group is tested with a single test in the first phase, while in the second phase only subjects in positive groups, if any, need to be tested again individually. In this paper, we address the problem of group testing design, which aims to determine a partition into groups of a finite population in such a way that cardinality constraints on the size of each group and a constraint on the expected total number of tests are satisfied while minimizing a linear combination of the expected number of false negative and false positive classifications. First, we show that the properties and model introduced by Aprahmian et al. can be extended to the group test design problem, which is then modeled as a constrained shortest path problem on a specific graph. We design and implement an ad hoc algorithm to solve this problem. On instances based on Sant\'e Publique France data on Covid-19 screening tests, the results of the computational experiments are very promising.

We see spikes in unemployment rates and turbulence in the securities markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments are responding with aggressive monetary expansions and large-scale economic relief plans. We discuss the implications on banks and the economy of prudential regulatory intervention to soften the treatment of non-performing loans and ease bank capital buffers. We apply these easing measures on a sample of Globally Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) and show that these banks can play a constructive role in sustaining economic growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, softening the treatment of non-performing loans along with easing capital buffers should not undermine banks' solvency in the recovery period. Banks should maintain usable buffer in the medium-term horizon to absorb future losses, as the effect of COVID-19 on the economy might take time to fully materialise.

Les perturbations économiques dues à la pandémie mondiale de Covid-19 ont déclenché d'innombrables litiges entre les entreprises sur la manière de faire respecter leurs relations contractuelles. Dans ce contexte, la survie des entreprises devient un réel problème lorsque les partenaires dans les relations verticales ou les chaînes de valeur mondiales se comportent de manière opportuniste. Ce comportement d'exploitation devrait-il être examiné comme des pratiques anticoncurrentielles par les autorités de la concurrence, en toute séparation des tribunaux ordinaires?Dans cet article, nous soutenons que la règle bien connue de l'abus de l'état de dépendance économique (ASED) pourrait dissuader l'opportunisme qui survient également lors de la pandémie de Covid-19 ou de toute autre crise mondiale. En fait, rejetés par la Chicago School de l'antitrust, non reconnus par la doctrine du contrat, à l'exception de sa facette de conduite négligente, les abus d'exploitation pourraient réintégrer la liste des pratiques néfastes pour les consommateurs, bien qu'après une analyse complexe. L’article examine en outre dans quelle mesure l’ASED, dissuadant un large éventail de comportements d’exploitation, comble le vide laissé par les dispositions réprimant les pratiques déloyales, même s’il confère une latitude considérable au pouvoir discrétionnaire des juges spécialisés. L'article soutien que la mise en œuvre de l'ASED assurerait une plus grande dissuasion de l'opportunisme légal dans la mesure où elle rétrécit les fissures du corpus juridique entre les abus d'exclusion et d'exploitation. Economic disruptions due to the global Covid-19 pandemic have unleashed uncountable litigation between firms on how to enforce their contractual relationships. In this context, the survival of undertakings becomes a real issue when partners in vertical relationships or global value chains behave opportunistically. Should this exploitative conduct be scrutinized as anti-competitive practices by the competition authorities in full separation from ordinary courts? In this paper, we argue that the well-known rule of abuse of the state of economic dependence (ASED) could deter opportunism that arises likewise during the Covid-19 pandemic or any other global crises. Actually, rejected by the Chicago School of Antitrust, and not acknowledged by the contract doctrine except its facet of negligent conduct, exploitative abuses could reintegrate the list of harmful practices to the consumers albeit after an intricate analysis. The article further investigates the extent to which the ASED, deterring a wide spectrum of exploitative conduct, fills the gap left by the provisions punishing unfair practices albeit it confers a considerable room for the specialist judges' discretion. Such ASED implementation would ensure more deterrence of the lawful opportunism inasmuch it narrows cracks of the legal corpus between exclusionary and exploitative abuses.