“Île-de-France is clearly needing some help because what happened to the East of France is coming to Ile-de-France…” A statement French Hospital Federation (Fédération Hospitalière de France – FHF) chairman Frédéric Valletoux has made to our peers on BFM TV and that has come as a bombshell! But it’s first a sad analysis of the fight against the coronavirus epidemic…. On Wednesday night already, Health director general Jérôme Salomon told about “major tension” in Île-de-France, making of this region the one where the situation is the “most critical”, after the East. On France Inter, Public Assistance of the Paris Hospital (AP-HP, Assistance Publiques des Hôpitaux de Paris) crisis medical director Bruno Riou confirmed too this morning that in hospitals in Seine-Saint-Denis there was no longer place in ICU.
Are Île-de-France hospitals soon to be overcrowded? The answer is yes and Frédéric Valletoux gives some alarming precisions about the moment the capacity will reach its limits, naming “within 24 to 48 hours” which is this weekend - Saturday March 28 and Sunday March 29, 2020. As for the solution, it’s found: “solidarity between regions, between hospitals, multiplying patient transfer operations”.
Bruno Riou has made the same analysis, explaining that currently “one is pushing walls everywhere”. He also considers that transferring patients from hospitals to hospitals so that they are not overcrowded and they can still manage the wave that is yet to come: “Today, like in East of France, have been used inter-regional transfers, we shall start transferring patients in least contaminated regions and that still have beds in ICU” he explains.
He continues: “It should be driven on a domestic level; priorities should be sorted out. So far, priority was the East, but this priority will quickly become Île-de-France too and we should start envisaging this kind of things”. Declarations Health Minister Oliver Véran should answer to.
