Curfew extends in France to prevent saturation of hospital services

“The month of November will be trying. “ It is under this dark omen that Prime Minister Jean Castex announced, Thursday, October 22, that fifty-four departments are now affected by the curfew. It will apply from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. according to the same rules as in the metropolitan areas already affected by the measure.

As a result, access to the solidarity fund and the amounts allocated each month to businesses will be strengthened in order to support the catering and event sectors. Measures which represent a cost estimated between 1.3 billion and 1.5 billion euros per month.

This extension of the curfew comes as the spread of SARS-CoV-2 intensifies throughout France, as elsewhere in Europe. The virus’s reproduction rate is currently around 1.35, “Which, in concrete terms, means a doubling of the number of cases in fifteen days, underlined the head of government. The coming weeks will be tough. Our hospital services are going to be put to the test. “

In Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the situation is already critical, 2,534 people with Covid-19 are currently hospitalized there, including 360 in intensive care. The Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, announced Thursday evening that all scheduled surgical care in the region has been delayed for a period of at least two weeks. “This announcement is a relief, we were just waiting for that”, reacted Jean-Christophe Richard, head of intensive care at the Croix-Rousse hospital in Lyon.

Valuable human resources

In the intensive care units of the Hospices Civils de Lyon, the bed occupancy rate for Covid-19 patients is 95%. At Croix-Rousse, the beds assigned to resuscitation went from fifteen normally to twenty-five on Thursday and they require trained personnel.

The deprogramming of non-emergency operations will thus make it possible to transfer precious human resources to critical care. But patients who have been arriving intensively for a week in conventional medicine services will still saturate resuscitations in two weeks, raising fears “A Mulhouse-style scenario”. “If the curfew does not work, the risk is that we will be exceeded”, worries Mr. Richard. Especially since the transfers of patients between establishments in the same region, which had been put in place during the confinement, are now made more complicated. Indeed, in Saint-Etienne, Grenoble and Clermont-Ferrand, the incidence rates have skyrocketed last week.

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