The situation in Paris is worrying, patients are being evacuated from hospitals

The decision was made, which is a difficult decision to extend the closure to the next weekend in Alpes-Martimes, as in the previous two weekends.

The government spokesman said. He indicated that the Defense Council will meet again next week before the emergency quarantine measure is lifted, given that indicators are already improving on the French Riviera.

On Tuesday, the authorities of the northern county of Pas-de-Calais also announced that due to the increase in the variant of the British virus, the weekend closure will be maintained throughout March, and patients will be transferred from the health facilities of the area to the Belgian border hospitals. .

After the epidemic situation in France varies greatly from region to region, the government has been following a new strategy for a few weeks: it has established weekend closures in the most infected areas to slow the spread of the virus.

Although epidemiological indicators have been stagnant for almost a month (between 20 and 25,000 new cases per day and 25,000 hospital admissions) and have even fallen by 2 percent in the last week, the number of people who need intensive care has increased during a period of time. week due to more contagious variants, especially in the metropolitan agglomeration.

About 4,000 infected rooms in the ventilator are treated in Paris.

That’s half what it was at the peak of the first wave of the epidemic a year ago, but from 2,600 in early January, it gradually reached the level of the second wave in late November. At the peak in December, there were nearly 5,000 in the intensive care unit.

A government spokesman acknowledged on Wednesday that the hospital situation in the Ile-de-France region is particularly worrying, with plans to transfer patients from the capital’s hospitals to other regions in the coming days.

Already on Monday, the regional health authority asked all hospitals in the capital to postpone 40 percent of less urgent interventions to have enough capacity to receive new patients in the coming days.

However, a government spokesman ruled out the closure of the capital and its surroundings, where more than 12 million people live.

The closing of the weekend will affect about 2 million people in the north and less than a million in the south in a country with more than 66 million inhabitants.

Currently, there is a nightly curfew nationwide starting at 6 p.m., restaurants, cultural institutions, and sports venues have been closed for more than four months, but schools and stores under 10,000 square feet are open. .

So far, more than 89,000 have died from the epidemic.

Of the 9.3 million doses of vaccine received in the country so far, more than 4 million (6.2 percent) received the first dose and 2 million (3 percent) received both components.