“The patients we have today in our intensive care units are unvaccinated patients” against the Covid-19, alerted Wednesday, November 10 on franceinfo doctor Patrick Goldstein, head of the Emergency Department and the North Samu at the Lille University Hospital, while the coronavirus epidemic is on the rise again. The Minister of Health Olivier Véran indicated Wednesday evening on TF1 that “this clearly looks like the start of a fifth wave”. This fifth wave is at a “distant horizon”, specifies Patrick Goldstein, ensuring that his intensive care unit “is not in tension”. The doctor relies on vaccination to contain the epidemic and “do not understand” vaccine-resistant. “We are in irrationality.”
franceinfo: Is the fifth wave of the Covid-19 epidemic on the horizon?
Patrick Goldstein: It is on the distant horizon. But all of Olivier Véran’s words are fair and rational. I am in Lille. We have regular exchanges with our Belgian neighbors. Our Belgian neighbors, in one week, doubled the number of patients who entered critical care. These patients are virtually all unvaccinated patients. We are not in tension on the intensive care units at the moment. But the patients we have today in our intensive care units are unvaccinated patients.
Can we escape this fifth wave, when it is already there among our European neighbors?
I think we can escape a major hospital impact. The fact that we have patients suffering from Covid, we will not escape it.
“We will not escape it because it is winter, it is the resurgence of winter pathologies.”
Patrick goldsteinto franceinfo
The flu will come. You need to get the flu shot. Bronchiolitis is here, and you know it’s a big problem for us in our hospitals. So in winter, people are at home. We stay at home. Viruses circulate. Yes, there is going to be Covid. Now, if the vaccination is correctly distributed and if the barrier gestures are respected, we hope that there will not be a major hospital impact and that there will not be serious forms.
Today, six million people are still not vaccinated. How do you explain it?
I have no response. For me, we are irrational. There are many answers. There is a kind of collective fantasy about the danger of this vaccine. I do not understand. It is outside my system of reasoning. They did not see what was going on in the intensive care unit. They are not aware of what is happening today in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary. So many countries that are counting their deaths by the hundreds, if not thousands, every day. And these are countries where the vaccination rate is low. So very clearly, today, mortality and severity are totally correlated with too low a vaccination. It is indisputable.