Dive into the heart of a department hard hit by the Covid-19 epidemic. Teams from France 2 went to the Delafontaine hospital in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), in a department where the incidence rate is around 800 new cases per 100,000 inhabitants over one week.
For four days, they followed caregivers who are struggling to cope with the third wave of the epidemic. This brings in many younger patients, forcing the staff to adapt every day, pushing back the walls, moving the furniture. A crisis situation that has become daily in the establishment.
Day 1: 24/7 watch over patients in distress
On the 8th floor of this building, the internal medicine department has 75 beds, 34 of which are occupied by Covid patients, all conscious but placed on oxygen, like a 42-year-old man and usually athletic, who did not think “not concerned” by disease. Faced with the third wave, the number of caregivers has been increased. Nearly nine nurses and nursing assistants watch over the sick 24 hours a day. But the pressure keeps increasing for them, who “take their troubles patiently”.
Day 2: facing the Covid-19, push the walls of the hospital
The virus is still gaining ground. “The problem with this wave is that we are taking care of both Covid patients and non-Covid patients. Last year, the whole hospital was just Covid”, explains the doctor Pascal Bolot, head of the neonatology service at Saint-Denis hospital center. We must therefore push the walls. To relieve the overflowing Covid services of the hospital, part of the operating room will be requisitioned to become an annex of the intensive care unit. Train nurses to work there, install the appropriate equipment … Here, 75% of conventional operations have been deprogrammed to allow them to face this challenge.
Day 3: overwhelmed emergencies in an overloaded hospital
It is only 10 am and the number of patients arriving in the emergency room is already too high. We have to rearrange the space, move the furniture, make room. Day and night, patients parade. Almost half have the Covid. “They arrive in waves, there are days when there are many, days when there are not many (…). We try to do the maximum, but we must find the places“, explains Sylvie Setham, emergency nurse. To avoid contamination, Covid-19 patients are separated from the others in a separate room, isolated with the means at hand. For the hardest hit patients, we must find available beds, sometimes elsewhere in the region, the Saint-Denis hospital being overloaded. Between two patients, the doctors keep making phone calls.
Day 4: worry around infected pregnant women
The intensive care unit receives more and more pregnant hospitalised for Covid-19: ten since February, against only one during the first wave. Caregivers have no explanation, but the preferred hypothesis is that of a more aggressive British variant, causing severe forms in younger patients. In the service, a intubated woman was placed in artificial coma. She arrived pregnant two days earlier. To optimize her chances of survival against the virus, caregivers operated on her: a cesarean was performed to extract her baby. “She was 28 weeks with gestation, so the baby was viable, he could be saved “, explains the doctor Mathilde Azzi, resuscitator at the Saint-Denis hospital center.
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