In an interview with “Echos”, the director general of Public Assistance – Hospitals of Paris warns of the current situation of hospitals, battered by the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron and Delta variants.
“It will rock” in January in hospitals under the effect of the shortage of caregivers affected by Covid-19 and the outbreak of the Omicron variant, warns Thursday in an interview with “Echoes” the director general of Public Assistance – Paris hospitals (AP-HP), Martin Hirsch.
“The first certainty is that it will rock,” he warns, while the Delta variant continues “to cause many admissions” and the Omicron wave, more contagious according to the WHO, is gaining momentum.
If the forms are rather “light”, “we note that it already strikes a large number of caregivers, (…) the rate of absenteeism increases strongly, with sick leaves which multiply and no complete team”, alert Martin Hirsch.
“15 crucial days”
The comparison with England, where the epidemic is a few days ahead of France, is striking: “With Omicron, 25% of their caregivers had been arrested. It has nothing to do with the first wave”. , marked by absenteeism around 11%, he underlines. It is “a bit as if Omicron threatened to withdraw 1,000 to 1,500 nurses from our establishments – knowing that there are already so many missing”, he sums up, speaking of “15 crucial days”. This will lead to additional deprogramming, “in surgery as well as in medicine, except for vital indications and transplants”.
A ministerial directive already provides, to avoid the shortage, that caregivers “positive but asymptomatic” continue to work.
In Ile-de-France, 380 people were admitted to critical care this week, bringing the total number of patients to 700. As of January 7, this number should continue to increase, with 830 to 1,000 patients concerned, according to Martin Hirsch. However, “75% of patients in intensive care have either no vaccine or a single dose,” he says. During this holiday period and the circulation of other winter pathologies, “the absence of city medicine” also poses difficulties: “it is impossible to have a doctor come to your home at this time, and therefore emergency medical services are over-requested”, notes the director general of AP-HP, hoping that things will return to normal with the start of the school year.
For the second day in a row, the threshold of 200,000 new cases in 24 hours was exceeded in France on Thursday.
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