The process is surprising: a drive-in screening. This is the project currently being studied at the Manchester hospital in Charleville-Mézières (Grand Est) and which could see the light of day soon.
From your car, in the same way as you order a hamburger in a fast-food chain, you could thus be tested for coronavirus, without leaving the vehicle. Through this window, the caregiver will perform the necessary nasal swab, using a cotton swab.
Reservations among health professionals
But if the device is innovative, it does not fail to arouse some reservations among health professionals. Alexandre Bleibtreu, infectious disease doctor at the Pitié salpêtrière is very skeptical: "Any screening is a biomedical act". According to him, carrying it out from a vehicle turns out to be complicated as much as a "badly made swab can lead to a false negative result", he warns before adding: "But above all, to take a sample without power to question the patient, without being able to take his temperature, his saturation, his blood pressure and his heart rate, it is in my opinion a little light ".
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If experiments have already been carried out, this screening will only be implemented if the region's reference hospitals, those of Nancy and Strasbourg, are fully booked. And the emergency doctors will only take care of patients sent by the samu.