During a press conference given on Thursday, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, recognized "organizational difficulties" in the screening of Covid-19.
Laboratories are crumbling under patients, and France, unlike its German neighbor, is not doing it.
Why such a mess in the tests, in France?
Europe 1 takes stock.
"We are facing organizational difficulties on the tests", acknowledged Thursday the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, during his press conference.
The government is therefore tightening the screw in cities, such as Nice where new drastic measures were announced on Friday.
But why such a mess in screening?
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Too many patients and too strict regulations
The first explanation for this congestion of tests is a problem that medical biologists have constantly denounced: free tests.
Indeed, from the announcement of the full reimbursement of PCR tests by Health Insurance, the laboratory assistants found themselves with an influx of patients in front of their laboratories.
To which are added more structural problems.
The regulation of medical analysis laboratories is far too restrictive.
It was also pointed out by the Competition Authority in a note.
Prohibition of outsourcing analyzes, prohibition of cooperation between laboratories ... This stacking of rules grips the system, and does not help to fluidify the "traffic" of tests.
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Centralization and deindustrialization
Too much centralization in France does not improve things, since everything must go through the Directorate General of Health (DGS).
An organization that is too vertical compared to Germany, for example.
Our neighbors have indeed been much more responsive thanks to an operation that relies on the Lander and the companies.
But there is another problem, very French: deindustrialisation.
In France, we do not manufacture automatons allowing to analyze several tests at the same time, and we therefore depend on imports.
However, France is not one of the priority countries for orders.
Here again, Germany has been more responsive.
She managed on her own, very early on, to produce these machines.
Free tests, overly strict regulations, too much centralization, deindustrialisation ... These are all parameters that slow down the testing policy, and so many reasons to think that, despite Olivier Véran's announcements, the mess around screening should not be as fast as the minister imagines.