In red, the Lot appears very alone in the South-West of France. If the deconfinement card presented on Thursday by the Minister of Health Olivier Véran did not evolve by May 11, then deconfinement in the department would be stricter than all of its neighbors. For all the local elected representatives contacted by Europe 1 and who have expressed themselves publicly, one thing is certain: there was a diagnostic error. They are formal: this red color does not at all represent the reality of the health situation in the Lot.
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The map, as we explain to you in this article, was built on two parameters: the active circulation of the virus and the hospital pressure on the resuscitation capacities. It is on the first point that the error would have been made for the Lot department. Because, faced with General misunderstanding, the Regional Health Agency (ARS) Occitanie has spoken.
An "over-rated" setting
The rate of active circulation of the virus is based on the reports from each hospital in each department. Each emergency department compares the number of passages for suspected coronavirus and the total number of passages for any reason. Except that in the lot, the emergency services would have over-estimated the percentage of suspicion of Covid-19.
"A rapid analysis of these data concluded that a number of samples recently taken by Lot's emergency services had led in recent weeks to overstate the percentage of emergency visits for suspected coronavirus compared to reality", writes l 'ARS Occitanie in a press release.
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"Data imputed in error will be corrected"
"The indicator used at the national level was probably distorted for the Lot department," she acknowledges. "The data imputed by error will be corrected in the hospitals concerned so that the indicator calculated for the Lot is the same as in the other departments", she writes, claiming to have entered Santé Publique France in this sense.
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"We can also refine these data with the number of positive tests that can be carried out in this department. So, I repeat, it is not because the Lot appears red today that it will necessarily be red at 11 May ", declared Olivier Véran on Thursday evening.
It is therefore very likely that this department, which has known only 16 deaths linked to Covid-19 since the start of the crisis, will go green in the coming days. But in the Lot, as everywhere in France, watch out for a relaxation, which would immediately cause a return to more strict confinement.