While the milestone of 200,000 positive Covid-19 cases per day was exceeded between Christmas and New Year, the indicators of the public hospital are all in the red. If hospitalizations continue to increase, around 18,000 daily, the arms are lacking, including a doubling of the rate of absenteeism of agents in one year, from 9% to 18%, according to the CGT.
In addition to exhausted nursing staff, surgical interventions continue to be deprogrammed and 20% of beds are still closed in large hospitals. A situation all the more worrying as the peak of the fifth wave “should peak in mid-January,” epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet told the “Sunday Journal”. “The hospital peak could take place a week later, (…) Île-de-France will be the first to be affected,” said the member of the Scientific Council, while the Omicron variant is now the majority in France. In “a hospital already severely affected by 22 months of health crisis”, he said to expect “a huge logistical and organizational challenge”.
While Emmanuel Macron’s number one objective is to preserve the country’s economy by limiting the duration of isolation of people positive for the coronavirus, for the CGT, the urgency would rather be to strengthen the health sector: ” The public hospital and its staff remain the poor relatives of the government’s management of the crisis. Any delay in taking the necessary measures to break with austerity policies increases the risk of staff resigning, delays the recruitment and training of staff, and degrades our health system. “
For lack of resources and after two years of crisis, caregivers are exhausted. ALAIN JOCARD / AFP
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