Since the start of the pandemic, 220 million Covid tests have been carried out in France. Often carried out by young people, it is difficult to say how many there are or to know when they started to settle there, but the reality remains: the business of testing can pay off big, and that has not escaped the notice of young people. That even becomes the new golden student job, et not just for young people with medical training. The students encountered in the barnums of Paris come from all sides: architecture, human resources, hairdressing, mBut everyone puts on the blouse with the same objective: gmake money.
Pablo is one of them. He started testing this summer while in BTS. For him, it worked so well that he didn’t go back to class at the start of the school year: dSince then, he has been working in a start-up which subcontracts these screenings on behalf of pharmacies, and which hires about sixty testers, with an average age of around 25 years old.
“These young people come above all to look for money, because it is an activity that pays quite well, he explains. Overall with us, a young person will be paid 25 euros per hour 10 to 12 hours a day, for traditional pharmacy hours.”
“The hardest can work 7 days a week, 30 days a month, and can earn up to 5, 6, 7 or 8,000 euros per month, it’s colossal.”
Pablo, collaborator of the startupat franceinfo
Not all young people earn the same: cit depends on how much free time they have to test. But on average, everyone can earn a minimum wage at the end of the month by working 15 hours a week. And with around a million tests carried out every day, in France, du work, there is.
Apart from health professionals, any citizen can become a scout, ohu rather “anti-Covid-19 mediator”, that’s the official term. For this, two obligations: La first, register for an initiation to online screening, lin second, take seven hours of practical training with a healthcare professional. It is on this last point that the unions of pharmacists warn. In reality, there are simply not enough places available in practical training. Result: some scouts begin to test illegally.
The other danger denounced by the unions is that these scouts are left unsupervised in the barnums. Lto also, it is a problem. Yet the rule is clear:under the barnums, vsStudents should always be accompanied by a doctor or pharmacist.
In theory, everyone has their own role: the young person tests,i.e. he inserts the swab into the patient’s nostril, but the rest of the screening is carried out, on the other hand, by the health professional. Except that in fact, the students are often alone under their tents, as explained Pierre-Olivier Variot, president of the Union of Community Pharmacists. “Doing the extraction is a healthcare professional’s job. Putting the product on the test, making sure it’s the right test, stored at the right temperature, that’s a healthcare professional’s job. And the rendering of the result, it is also up to the health professional to do so”, he lists, acknowledging that in practice, “It doesn’t happen that way at all.”
To recap: agreed, deficit start-ups in the training of these young people, manque of framing under the barnums, sThis therefore raises the question of the reliability of these tests. Over the past seven days, an average of more than 360,000 new positive cases have been detected in France: cis the number really the right one, odoes u only represent correctly screened people? In short, are we not far from reality?