“We have many regrets, but who would not have regrets about such an exceptional crisis?”, asks Jean-François Delfraissy, president of the Scientific Council, Sunday July 31 on franceinfo. While the body he has chaired since the start of the pandemic will be replaced by a new committee dedicated to the next health crises, he returns to the decisions taken by the Scientific Council, in particular those concerning nursing homes.
>> Covid-19: “I never would have believed that the crisis would last so long”, confides Jean-François Delfraissy, on the eve of the dissolution of the Scientific Council
“In the name of health, believing we are doing the right thing, all of us, directors of nursing homes, administrations, have put health before humanity”, he laments. According to Jean-François Delfraissy, “The opening of nursing homes was complex, variable from one establishment to another“, provoking “slip syndromes” in patients who let themselves die because they could not see their loved ones.
Although he recognizes that “on an exceptional crisis of this type and in particular over the period of March, April, May 2020”it was necessary to act quickly, he regrets the absence of discussions with the citizens.
“We could have, on schools, on the elderly, rely on the opinion of citizens. But the politician did not want to do it” at the national level.
Jean-Francois Delfraissyat franceinfo
Jean-François Delfraissy said he was convinced that “human intelligence will eventually dominate the capacity of this virus”, “this bitch”but remember that “the pandemic is not over”. “There will be new waves, in the fall, during the winter of 2022-2023, we are not done with the Covid-19”, he warns. According to him, “the virus remains present with an ability to mutate, to change, it has not finished its evolution and this explains the particular duration of this Covid crisis”.
However, the professor says he is confident about how to handle the ongoing crisis. “We are going to make sure that the global response makes it possible to live with the variants”, he assures. Jean-François Delfraissy estimates that compared to 2020, “where we knew nothing”, “now, science has advanced a lot, even in an extraordinary way, we have vaccines, treatments, we have different tools and therefore the overall response is obviously different”.