Intensive care units are full to the brim – VG

While the streets are almost empty of people, there will soon be no more patients in the intensive care units of French hospitals.

For employees, phone calls to relatives of corona patients have become a daily routine. The same happens with the transmission of the message of death.

– It’s okay at the moment. But it is true that, I do not know what he has been told, his respiratory condition is deteriorating, says Dr. Julien Carvelli at the largest hospital in the south of France, La Timone, by phone with a relative.

The AP news agency, who has spent 24 hours in the hospital’s intensive care unit, writes that they were present during the conversation. According to them, Carvelli must pick up at least eight of those phones a day.

The second corona wave has hit France harder than the first. “The virus is spreading rapidly, even the most pessimistic calculations could not predict,” President Emmanuel Macron said in late October.

A week later, a record number of 86,852 new cases of infection were recorded in one day.

Despite the fact that the number of cases of infection registered daily has decreased since the country introduced a new national closure two weeks ago, the number of hospitals continues to set new records:

• On Wednesday, 33,497 people were admitted with COVID-19 to French hospitals, the highest number so far in the pandemic. In the last week, however, there has been a slight decrease in the number of daily admissions

• For more than 10 days, 95 percent of the beds in the country’s intensive care units have been filled
• France is number seven on the list of countries with the most crown-related deaths. 46,273 people have lost their lives after being infected with the virus

In October, VG visited a hospital in Paris. “Knowing that my whole day will be about covid is very depressing. I see no way out. There is no way out.”said the head of the emergency room.

– Before they applauded us every night

Frustration among health professionals is great, according to AP. They believe that the authorities have not done enough to prepare the country for the second wave.

– Before, they applauded us every night. Now they tell us that we are just doing our job, says nurse Chloe Gascon (23) to AP.

When the first shutdown ended, the French government promised to spend the summer strengthening emergency and intensive care units in hospitals.

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Low infection rates provided a long-awaited respite and an opportunity to prepare for the next wave. But at Hospital La Timone, renovation work on the new emergency unit did not begin until early autumn. It opened two weeks ago, but it still has the trademark trademark, AP writes.

According to the news agency, there is also no time to train the nurses who have been called to the intensive care units. They must learn by observing.

At the breaking point in several countries

On Tuesday, French Health Minister Olivier Véran said the country was in the process of regaining control of the virus. However, he believes it is too early to soften the comprehensive measures that were introduced two weeks ago.

– If we let it go too soon, we may face a further sharp increase in infection that will reverse all the efforts that the French people have made for several weeks, Veran said.

In other European countries too, intensive capacity is at a breaking point. In the Italian city of Naples, large hospitals are overcrowded and can no longer receive new patients. Several of the patients receive treatment in their vehicles.

Patients from Belgium, the Netherlands, and France are transferred to German intensive care units. And in Spain, beds for severe coronary disease have been filled since October.