“Covid-19 patients who arrive at the hospital are not correlated with the number of new cases per day and that is reassuring”, said Friday, November 19 on franceinfo Jean-Michel Constantin, anesthesiologist-resuscitator at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, while France has entered the fifth wave of the pandemic. It is not for him “not at all inconsistent” that the Haute Autorité de santé recommends a booster dose of the vaccine from the age of 40.
franceinfo: Do you think it essential to launch this process of a second vaccine booster dose (or 3rd dose) to an increasingly large population?
Jean-Michel Constantin: The vaccination recall process is not at all inconsistent and I believe it was intended. On the other hand, this should not be confused with what it is urgent and important to do immediately, that is to say especially not to lower your guard on barrier gestures, the mask and the pass. sanitary. This is what will allow us to avoid the incongruous increase in contamination that we are seeing happening. When we look at what is happening in the rest of Europe, we can imagine that the pressure will rise in France in terms of contamination but not necessarily in terms of sick patients. The only way to limit contamination is through barrier gestures. The vaccination is for later.
Should what is happening with our neighbors serve as a warning to us?
We can probably limit contamination because we lowered our guard on barrier gestures a little less quickly than other countries. In addition, today in France we have a wave of contaminations, we do not have a wave of sick people. This is the real difference between France and the countries which surround it because we have a vaccination rate which is much higher. This is what protects us. However, if we let the contaminations flare up, we will necessarily end up having patients. For the moment, there is no real increase, neither in intensive care units, nor in infectious disease services. The patients who arrive are in any case not correlated with the number of new cases per day and that is reassuring. This is proof that the vaccine works to prevent severe forms. On the other hand, it would be inconsistent on our part not to prepare for potentially a wave of contamination. We are preparing, but if this wave of patients arrives, it will be complicated because the hospital is not doing well today.
Is this what worries you the most today? That the hospital is not able to do as much as in previous waves?
The hospital is unable and that is what worries us. For now, we are not in an immediate Covid-19 crisis. On the other hand, we are in a real crisis of the health system. We predicted at the time of the first wave that this would bring the hospital to its knees, and clearly the hospital is on its knees. He is ill. It’s worrying. If we ever have an influx of patients, which we do not want, it will be very complicated to manage.