While Olivier Véran announced on Wednesday the prospect of further relief at the beginning of March, in hospitals in Occitania, the decline of the fifth wave is expected to resume activities outside of Covid-19 and allow teams to breathe.
“It’s starting to shoot…”, loose Vincent Minville. The head of the anesthesia and resuscitation center at the Toulouse University Hospital hopes to see the end of this fifth wave soon. “It was very difficult for the teams, they showed a lot of professionalism, and we managed to cope. It is true that the arrival of the Omicron variant was quite worrying at the start, fortunately it generated less serious forms”, he notes.
The CHU, which welcomes 229 Covid patients on February 16, including 25 in intensive care, plans to reduce the airfoil and gradually reduce the capacity dedicated to the virus. “We would like to return to normal by the beginning of March, depending on the various indicators, and thus see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
A goal that the Carcassonne Hospital Center, in Aude, has also set itself. “For two years, we have been repeating this accordion movement regularly: we are taking capacity from other services to strengthen those dedicated to Covid at the time of waves of hospitalizations, then it’s the opposite. We hope to be able to enter this phase. -there soon because we have a large number of operations or other non-Covid care pending”, explains Alain Guinamant, director of the hospital center.
In Carcassonne, as in other health establishments, we agree that the arrival of this fifth wave was dazzling. Will its decline be as rapid? According to Pierre Ricordeau, director general of ARS Occitanie, “the peak has clearly passed”. “We are probably one of the regions that comes out of this wave the latest since we were among the last to be affected,” he explains. Sign of this decline: the flow of new hospitalizations is down: 700 new hospitalizations have been recorded in the last seven days, against 1100 over the previous seven days, details Pierre Ricordeau.
“A very good trend is emerging, with a decline starting, but the data, such as the incidence rate at 1,781 on average in the region, remains high, so we are not quite out of the situation yet. case, we must not completely let our guard down”, warns the general manager.
Tiredness and fatigue
And even if it is starting to fade, this fifth wave has left its mark: Jean-Claude Thieule, director of the Ariège Couserans hospital center, describes a “very complicated situation on the side of the teams who are tired”. “This represents a real complexity in our management, in particular because of the absence rate which is higher than the average and which led us to temporarily close five short-stay beds in the geriatrics department”, he explains. Same observation in Carcassonne: “The Covid forces the teams to be flexible and flexible, but after two years of pandemic, it becomes exhausting, and generates a high rate of absenteeism”, indicates Alain Guinamant. A situation which, according to him, can be explained both by “weariness and fatigue”, but also because caregivers, despite the vaccine, also fall ill.
A fatigue which also turns out to be psychological in the face of Covid-19 patients who are overwhelmingly unvaccinated: “For many caregivers, it was the icing on the cake of having to treat people who could have avoided this, and especially deal with families that are more difficult to manage because they are in denial of the disease or against vaccination”, explains Vincent Minville.
In these establishments, we say to ourselves “admiring the investment of the staff”: “Despite everything, the teams have not given up and for that we must thank them”, underlines Vincent Minville, who hopes that this decline “will finally allow them to blow”.
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