The pressure of the fifth wave of Covid-19 drops a little, Monday, January 31, in the intensive care unit of the Croix-Rousse hospital in Lyon. Patricia Zoppi, nurse feels it. “We breathe a little, so we find our usual patient base”.
His colleague, Emilien Darne, describes the situation as follows: “Covid hospitalizations are patients who have very long stays. And there, we have two phenomena: patients who are better, who can leave our home, who are replaced by patients who come for shorter durations.We have again a turnover “.
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As the restrictions put in place by the government begin to be lifted, the resuscitation service was able to attack the weekend with a few free beds, adds resuscitator Mehdi Mezidi: “It’s nice, it’s going down. It’s true that being able to free up two or three beds before a weekend is exceptional. Finally, really, it’s been a very long time since we had that.”
Patients with the Omicron variant do not cross the doors of the “sheave” directed by Professor Jean-Christophe Richard and which has 21 beds: “We’ve had 570 patients over the past two years. We’ve only had three patients who had the Omicron variant, while there are a lot of Omicron patients in the hospital.”
The most serious patients are affected by the Delta variant. Like this intubated young woman, who came in pregnant and in front of whom Professor Richard stops: “We are doing a fetal extraction, so the baby is fine. He is in neonatal intensive care. And she has been in this condition for more than a month with extremely severe Covid-related lung damage. with the message of prevention which is really to vaccinate pregnant women. Afterwards, with Omicron, we don’t know, because it’s true that we didn’t have any entry from pregnant women.”
In this new context, the easing of restrictive measures is not viewed with a negative eye by the staff of Croix-Rousse, explains the head of department: “It’s to aim for herd immunity by telling ourselves the virus is less serious, come on, everyone will be immunized. For the moment, it’s a strategy that seems to be rather paying off, at least for our vision. of an intensive care physician.”
“We are not saturated because the disease is less serious and we hope that the fifth wave is the last.”
Jean-Christophe Richard, head of the intensive care unitat franceinfo
At the level of the public hospital, in Lyon, the occupancy rate of resuscitation beds rose in less than a week from 99% to 91%. Caregivers no longer speak of saturation but serenity has not completely returned. They are still faced with a lack of personnel sufficiently trained in the requirements of resuscitation.