End of the festivities and return to reality. The month of January will be “difficult in the hospital”, given the Covid-19 epidemic and “other pathologies”, the Minister of Solidarity and Health, Olivier, warned this Monday, January 3 on France Inter. Véran, saying that he did not see the Omicron variant “slowing down” for the moment. “The risk with Omicron is a risk of saturation of our hospitals, conventional hospital beds,” he warned. “Omicron is less dangerous” and “causes less acute respiratory distress, and the need for intensive care beds is less than with the previous variants”, but it can cause “oxygen requirements of three, four days and therefore one expects an influx of patients in conventional hospital beds, “said the minister.
“The flu has started, the gastroenteritis is there. The other pathologies, the other people who have chronic diseases need to be treated. Of the 400,000 medical beds in our hospitals today, 20,000 are already occupied by patients Covid even before the impact of the Omicron wave, “said Véran. “We are going to spend a difficult month of January in the hospital. The caregivers who are hard at work” and “who have not taken a vacation, know it”, continued the minister.
Given the high contagiousness of Omicron and the vaccination, “this is maybe, maybe – again, it’s all in the maybe – the last of the waves,” he said. . “Considering the rate of contamination in our country and elsewhere on the planet, it is likely that we have all acquired some form of immunity either by vaccination, or by infection, or both,” he said. he explains. “At the end of the first wave, there were 4 to 5% of the population who had reached some form of immunity and we had no vaccine. (…) We will have, at the end of the Omicron wave, an immunity which will be much higher than 50%. Even with the vaccination almost 100% in reality, “he added.
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