The intensive care unit of Saint-Louis hospital, in Paris on May 28, 2020. – AFP
The epidemic of Covid-19 continues to mark time in France, where the lowest daily hospital record (13 dead) was recorded on Sunday since mid-March, before the introduction of the confinement unpublished population for two months.
On this choice made to advise confinement, “basically, we had no choice,” assured Sunday Jean-François Delfraissy, the president of the Scientific Council responsible for enlightening the government. And to discuss the then uncontrolled viral situation and the tests to diagnose the disease in insufficient quantity. “It was the least bad decision,” he said on BFMTV, about this measure applied in France between March 17 and May 11.
“Let the Covid run”
Returning to general containment in the event of a second wave is not an option, however, he insisted. In such a case, “it will probably be necessary to let the Covid run in the young population and try to protect, with their agreement, the most fragile, sick, precarious, or elderly,” he thus stressed in another interview to JDD, recalling that 85% of deaths linked to Covid-19 concern people over 75 years of age.
Since the start of the epidemic, 29,155 people have died in France, including 18,805 in hospitals and 10,350 in nursing homes and other medico-social establishments (the results for this sector have not been updated since June 2). The number of people hospitalized in serious condition in intensive care continues to drop, with 6 patients less in 24 hours, to 1,053, according to the balance sheet updated on Sunday.
Hospitalization in intensive care thus continues its permanent decline since the beginning of April when the peak had been reached with more than 7,000 patients in serious condition (for a national capacity in intensive care of the order of 5,000 beds before the crisis). Nearly a week after the start of the second phase of deconfinement, the Covid-19 epidemic is considered “largely controlled” in the country, confirmed Professor Delfraissy, stressing that health rules for children at school could be reduced by the end of June, in particular for “meals, recreation or sport”.
