According to the president of the Association of Emergency Physicians of France, “emergency services were closed for the first time in certain areas” for lack of personnel. The pandemic and the hospital crisis are cumulative, he says.
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Patrick Pelloux, emergency doctor and president of the Association of emergency physicians of France, reported Sunday, December 26 on franceinfo of a very complicated situation in hospitals, between the Covid-19 pandemic and the lack of personnel. “We work with 20% of closed beds, it’s very tense at the moment”, he said, as the number of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 continues to increase in France.
“This pandemic is cumulative with a hospital crisis”, he added. According to him, the hospital is already “disorganized” and the risk of saturation of intensive care and emergency services is real. It also ensures that “emergency services were closed for the first time in some areas because there were not enough staff”. Under these conditions, it is “extremely difficult to apply a good quality of care”, he warned, recalling that Covid patients “are added to all the other patients”. It therefore warns of the risk of increased service closures: “It will break like dominoes because the patients who want to be seen will go to another department, which will quickly be saturated.”
Patrick Pelloux says that patients who arrive in the emergency room with a Covid-19 infection are mostly unvaccinated. “This is the reality: serious patients affected by Covid-19 are those who are not vaccinated. You have to know this and insist that people get vaccinated”, he said. This seems to him all the more important with the arrival of the Omicron variant which seems “just as pathogenic as the Delta on the unvaccinated”, based on UK data. Faced with this fifth wave, Patrick Pelloux therefore considers that the vaccination pass is a good idea “because we have to force people to be vaccinated”.
According to him, more restrictive measures, such as postponing the start of the school year, would not be desirable. “Children must go to school. The saturation of hospitals does not indicate preventing children from returning to school”, he replied to the doctors who signed a forum in Sunday Newspaper to call for a postponement of the start of the school year.