The coronavirus wave is “sweeping” over France, which yesterday evacuated serious patients from the east of the country as Ile-de-France in turn approached saturation in the face of the epidemic.
To relieve the overwhelmed hospitals of the Grand Est, the main focus of the disease, a new air evacuation was organized yesterday the day after an unprecedented medical transfer by TGV of patients to the Center and the West of the country, less affected. And while the epidemic peak is still not reached, it is now Ile-de-France which reaches its limits.
“We are pushing the walls everywhere to accommodate these patients in intensive care as much as possible, (but) we are not yet on the plateau of the curve of the epidemic, we will have to find solutions”, warned professor Bruno yesterday morning Riou, AP-HP crisis medical director (hospitals in the Paris region).
He hoped that similar evacuations be quickly considered from the capital region to less affected regions in order to “find availability for the sick of tomorrow or the day after,” he said, while the services in Seine-Saint-Denis are already full.
“Fearsome tension”
We are in “a crisis that will last, a health situation that will not improve quickly,” added Prime Minister Édouard Philippe after a crisis meeting of the government by videoconference. “The epidemic wave that is sweeping France (…) is an extremely high wave and it subjects the entire healthcare system, the entire hospital system, to formidable tension.”
The authorities thus intend to strictly enforce the confinement now extended until April 15. More than 225,000 minutes have already been drawn up for breach of confinement for 3.7 million checks, according to the Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner.
Unpublished fact in the last report, the death of a teenage girl, Julie A., 16 years old, deceased at the Necker hospital in Paris, youngest victim to date of the epidemic in France (read the testimony below) . For the Director General of Health, Professor Jérôme Salomon, this information is “important, since severe forms in young people are extremely rare”. But Professor Riou explains that “even if the population of the youngest has an extremely low individual risk, with the fact that the affected population is increasing, naturally there will be some very severely ill patients among the youngest”.
48 patients from Grand Est evacuated to New Aquitaine
A military aircraft from Mulhouse (Haut-Rhin) landed yesterday in the early afternoon in Bordeaux for a new medical evacuation of six patients with Covid-19, the second for the New Aquitaine region. Forty-eight patients from the Grand Est coronavirus will be transferred this weekend by medical trains to hospitals in New Aquitaine, which would constitute the largest evacuation since the start of the health crisis, announced yesterday the Regional Agency of health (ARS) in Bordeaux.
“In total with those of today (arrived in Bordeaux this Friday at the beginning of the afternoon) we will have welcomed in three days 54 patients,” said Michel Laforcade, director general of ARS during a briefing. – telephone press. “Transport will a priori be done via two medical trains” to ten establishments in the region, in Poitiers, Limoges, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Bayonne and Pau in particular, he said.
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