“The flu is coming, the Covid is rising, the hospitals are already saturated”, wrote Rémi Salomon on Tuesday, President of the AP-HP Medical Commission. In fact, various winter illnesses are currently on the rise, while hospitals have been sounding the alarm for several months about understaffing in their departments.
However, with “the bronchiolitis that reappears a little after the holidays, the Covid that is always present and the flu, the emergency services will be in great demand”, explains Alain Ducardonnet, health consultant for BFMTV.
“This triple epidemic is becoming a real danger for the winter.”
Closed beds and no staff
For several months now, hospitals have warned about the closure of beds due to lack of personnel in their departments and the difficulty of recruiting new people.
In a message sent on Monday to the directors and department heads of the Hôpitaux de Paris, the general director Nicolas Revel and Rémi Salomon write that “the AP-HP emergency care services for adults have been experiencing difficulties for several days”. to find beds. “downstream”, which translates into the use of a “very high” number of stretchers.
For Rémi Salomon, “too many patients arrive” and “there are not enough staff to receive them”, to “keep the beds open in the departments”. This generates “congestion” and a high “stress level among caregivers, who find themselves in a situation where they know they cannot do the treatment correctly,” the doctor warned France Inter.
The white plan has thus been activated in several establishments.
The population is not sufficiently vaccinated against influenza
However, new patients could arrive in the coming weeks. Santé Publique France points out in its latest weekly bulletin the entry of five regions into the pre-epidemic phase of influenza in mainland France and recalls “the importance for people at risk of vaccinating against influenza without delay.”
Because the flu vaccination campaign is not complete. “We are missing 1.5 million doses” to inject, compared to the same time last year, he explains on BFMTV Pierre-Olivier Variot, president of the union of community pharmacists.
“It is still quite annoying, especially since we are coming out of two years in which the flu was very weak, even non-existent”, so “herd immunity is not necessarily there, especially among the most fragile”, he recalls.
“The herd immunity has been reduced compared to this virus, so this virus today has the ability to spread more easily in the human population”, also points out Bruno Lina, professor of virology at the Lyon University Hospital, for whom ” we kind of forgot what the impact of the flu might be.”
“We often talk about mortality” from the flu “but it is also the loss of autonomy of the elderly. There is so much loss of autonomy between hip fracture and flu infection. It is the same level,” explains the virologist. .
Therefore, the two scientists strongly call for vaccination. “We know that we avoid between 30 and 40,000 hospitalizations thanks to vaccination” and “at the same time we will protect the hospital system”, Bruno Lina emphasizes.
Covid is still there
If there are no more social distancing measures, Covid is still present in France and has experienced strong epidemic peaks in previous winters. Santé Publique France registered a 7.1% increase in hospitalizations with Covid-19 cases over the last week, with 4,356 patients, and intensive care admissions also increased, with +15.9%.
“Western Europe is experiencing the very probable beginning of a new (ninth) pandemic wave of Covid-19,” epidemiologist and director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Geneva Antoine Flahault wrote on November 17.
“There are no reports of abnormally severe forms and the vaccine (which dates back less than 6 months) seems to continue to protect against severe forms,” he added, calling on the population to get vaccinated.
Bronchiolitis clogging emergency department
It should also be remembered that France is in the midst of an epidemic of bronchiolitis, a disease seen mainly in babies, for several weeks. If Public Health France registered a decrease in the epidemic after the All Saints holidays, the epidemic remains at “very high levels”, the health authorities wrote last week.
A total of 6,882 children under the age of two attended the emergency room for bronchiolitis in mainland France during the week of November 14-20, 24% more than the previous week. Ultimately, some 2,552 children were hospitalized.
At the end of October, the babies in intensive care had already had to be transferred to other hospitals, due to lack of space in their establishment. Not to mention that other winter illnesses could clog hospital services in the coming weeks, such as chronic bronchitis.
The Minister of Health, François Braun, announced this week the release of an additional 543 million euros for the hospital, in addition to the 570 million promised to deal with the early epidemic of bronchiolitis. This funding “It is part of our unprecedented effort to support the hospital and all the staff who run it,” the minister said.
Source: BFM TV
