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SUBWAYIn mid-summer, on July 14, French President Emmanuel Macron declared France’s “war against Corona” over. After the traditional military parade on the national holiday, the head of state had invited nurses, nurses and doctors to the ceremony at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, on behalf of all the “combatants on the front”, where he would wear the blouses. blanches, the white coats that are common in France. calls, thanked them solemnly for their engagement, as if the worst lay behind the French.
He should have suspected that Macron spoke of the epidemic in the past tense in the summer. “We have to live with the virus,” was the slogan the president announced thereafter. At this point, all the efforts of the French government were clearly aimed at trying to spread optimism and cushion the dramatic economic recession as best as possible. After nearly two months of harsh lockdown and more weeks of strict mobility restrictions, a presidential adviser summed up the summer situation as follows: “We really have to leave the French alone for a while.”
The second wave came with greater force
The second wave came with even greater force. It was a “strong wave,” Prime Minister Jean Castex said earlier in the week, in the mood for the awkward announcements that followed Wednesday night: from midnight Saturday, the Paris area and eight other major French cities such as Marseille, Lyon, Grenoble and Lille. curfew between 9 pm and 6 am Macron announced this in a television interview. “Private contacts are the most dangerous,” the president warned.
If approved by Parliament, the night curfew will last for six weeks until early December. Restaurants, bars, cinemas and theaters will be saved from bankruptcy through bailout programs.
It’s a very tight tightrope that Macron is trying to do: slow down the virus, but by no means stop the economy again. Aid organizations estimate that there are already a million more poor people in France.
Forecast of collapse of the health system for November
Until now, Prime Minister Castex had deliberately avoided the term “second wave”. It has been arriving since the beginning of September and it was slowly accumulating, as big as a house: France reports 20,000 new infections every day. At the end of last week, even 27,000 cases in 24 hours. Eleven percent of test results are positive, in Paris it is even 17 percent.
Hospitals, where nearly 9,000 Covid 19 patients are now being treated, are being watched with concern. The number of intensive care patients in particular is steadily increasing. Nationwide it was Tuesday 1633. In the Paris area, half of the intensive care beds are already occupied by Covid patients and many houses have begun to postpone regular operations.
At this rate, the Pasteur Institute had calculated in September, the health system would collapse in mid-November. Experts expect 11,000 intensive care patients right now, with 5,882 beds currently.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran had spread like a mantra that capacity could be increased from 5,000 beds in March to 12,000. On closer inspection, it turns out that this is a dairy bill. At least 30,000 nurses would have to be hired. “What good is an intensive care bed if no one is next to it,” asks rhetorically Pierre Schwob Tellier, himself a nurse at Hôpital Beaujon in the Parisian suburb of Clichy?
The biggest bug is the “StopCovid” warning app
It seems that France has entered the second wave completely headless, despite all the official announcements. As of September there were a lot of tests, the labs were working on the attack, but the test results took up to two weeks to arrive. Authorities were overwhelmed with rebuilding the infection chains, citizens stood up when asked, others simply did not comply with quarantine rules.
The biggest failure is the “StopCovid” warning app, which France launched on its own, but is a real niche program with 2.3 million users. Not even the prime minister downloaded them, he confessed on television. It has notified a total of 93 users as contact persons, for weekly costs of 100,000 euros, it is said.
This circus-like pandemic policy has ensured that citizens have completely lost trust in the government, which was no longer strong. The latest polls show that 70 percent of those polled cannot see a “clear course” in Macron. Doctor and writer Christian Lehmann describes the initial announcement that the masks do not serve as a true “original sin”, only to make them mandatory weeks later. In his “diary of the epidemic”, he testifies that the government has a “catastrophic crisis management”.
The Genevan doctor Didier Pittet, whom she only “Dr. “Clean hands” because he invented the sanitizing gel. Macron entrusted him with a kind of autopsy on the Corona crisis and Pittet submitted a cautiously critical interim report on Tuesday. In general, France is in the middle of the field, the country was medically updated, it failed above all in its administrative structure. The communication of the crisis also provoked a “feeling of infantilization and distrust”.
“Many of my classmates collapse”
Hospital staff go to court much harder on the government. On Thursday, the nurses want to go out on the street again. But this time not as a showman for camera compatible honors, but to protest loudly. They are especially disappointed with the result of the “Ségur de la santé”, a round table of the Ministry of Health, in which, after arduous negotiations, a salary increase of 183 euros was achieved, which is still well below the European average with your income.
“Many of my colleagues collapse, throw in the towel, give up. There are massive layoffs because hardly anyone can stay in this job for more than five years, ”says nurse Schwob Tellier. “The state hospital is a machine for chipping wood in which we are shredded,” said the 31-year-old nurse, who helped organize Thursday’s day of action. The main problem is not even poor pay, but catastrophic working conditions are even more critical to collective burnout.
Shortly before the start of the fall break, all hospital employees were asked to give up the break for the time being. Not surprisingly, a third of nurses want to change jobs after the Corona crisis, according to a recent survey by the professional association.
The atmosphere at the Hôpital Bichat in Paris is not good either. There they prepare for long and difficult months. “Our staff is physically and mentally exhausted, completely exhausted by this sitting war. He did not have the opportunity to recover, ”says Jean-François Timsit, head of the intensive care unit. You know what you’re talking about. The first crown patient outside of Asia was in his ward. The Chinese tourist passed away on February 14. In exactly ten months, there have been 32,993 deaths in France since then.
