Where have the 10,000 artificial respirators gone in full containment, at the height of the coronavirus epidemic? This is the question asked Tuesday on Europe 1 by Professor Philippe Juvin, head of the emergency department of the Pompidou hospital in Paris and mayor Les Républicains de La Garenne-Colombes. On March 31, to cope with the influx of intensive care patients, Emmanuel Macron announced an order for 10,000 artificial respirators. According to our information, they were indeed manufactured ... but are not the most effective.
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"They are perhaps not the most efficient" ...
To establish in a few months the equivalent of three years of production, a consortium was created around Air Liquide, the only French manufacturer of respirators. Result, 9,984 devices left the factories. 9,400 have, at this stage, been purchased, specifies to Europe 1 the Directorate General of Health. Two different models were produced, including one called Osiris , which sparked controversy in the midst of a health crisis: it does not allow coronavirus patients to be ventilated.
"Their help is likely to be almost zero in the fight against the epidemic," we wrote in an article dated April 23. "It is a ventilator model that was never designed for the patients who concern us today. Its usefulness is therefore very limited", said Jean-Michel Constantin, head of the intensive care unit at the hospital. Pitié-Salpêtrière. "They are perhaps not the most efficient", admits Eric Maury, president of the French language intensive care company, at the microphone of Europe 1. But according to him, the Osiris models have been very useful especially in the context of ephemeral resuscitation units that had to be equipped urgently last spring.
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... "but we will be happy to have a stock of emergency respirators"
"We said to ourselves that we were going to be in deficit of respirators and the only respirator that it was possible to build quickly, it was this one", affirms Eric Maury. "If we find ourselves faced with a second wave, a flu that can be added to Covid-19 or a new epidemic, we will be happy to have a stock of emergency respirators that will be available", warns- he.
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Aborted respirator construction projects
Could France build new respirators? This is clearly not on the agenda, although the global tension over supply has largely abated today and the shortage is over. A large stock has been built up with Osiris devices , to the point that certain projects such as the one carried out by the CEA of Saclay and the Nantes University Hospital, which wanted to manufacture 5,000 additional devices, have even been stopped.