Confined since Wednesday, Guadeloupe has not finished drooling.

The health situation on the West Indian island continues to "deteriorate very sharply" with an "unprecedented number" of intensive care admissions which led to the first medical evacuations to the metropolis, the prefecture of Guadeloupe and the Agency announced on Friday. regional health in a joint press release.

For Doctor Marc Valette, head of the intensive care unit at the CHU de Guadeloupe, the island "has switched to disaster medicine". “The situation is a crisis situation, of appalling intensity, which we have never known until then,” he says, stressing that “the care of patients with Covid, who happen to us every days, is done to the detriment of other patients who need surgical management or who have chronic diseases ”. To date, 45 intensive care beds out of 48 are occupied at the CHU, including 36 for Covid patients.

Faced with the outbreak of the epidemic, the regional prefect decided to take new measures and announced the closure of all restaurants from Monday at 8 p.m.

Until now, despite the lockdown, unlike bars, restaurants were open at noon.

Take-out and home delivery will remain possible.

Guadeloupe entered its third confinement on Wednesday evening, with a strict curfew from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. and travel restrictions.

"Exponential growth"

"The incidence rate is alarming with 1,108.6 cases per 100,000 inhabitants over 7 rolling days against 875.6 cases last week", indicates the press release which reports 4,178 new cases recorded in four days, and four deaths in Guadeloupe and one in Saint-Martin.

The positivity rate also increased to 24.6% for 16,968 people tested.

"This exponential growth in cases puts our hospital system in great difficulty," the statement added.

Thursday, "an unprecedented number of resuscitation entries was recorded in a single day and the triggering of medical evacuations to the metropolis began," said the authorities, who report two evacuations on Thursday and two others scheduled for Saturday.

On this single day, the Pointe-à-Pitre hospital recorded ten additional entries in Covid resuscitation and three entries in non-Covid intensive care, while in recent days, the maximum number of entries in intensive care was four per day .

"The acceleration is therefore considerable", insists the press release which specifies that among the patients in intensive care, "none is vaccinated".

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Coronavirus in the West Indies: How to explain such an epidemic outbreak?

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