• The number of weekly PCR and antigen tests currently exceeds 4 million per week.

  • The new school protocol involving the massive screening of students has accentuated the already strong demand in the middle of the fifth wave of Covid-19.

  • The staff of pharmacies particularly called upon for this prevention must redouble their efforts and time to meet the demand.

On Monday alone, in France, more than 59,000 new cases of Covid-19 were recorded by Public Health France. This boom in contaminations leads by ricochet to a multiplication of contact cases that government policy encourages to detect. As a result, after having gradually fallen, "the number of PCR and antigen tests is exploding in pharmacies", assures Gilles Bonnefond, spokesperson for the Union of community pharmacists' unions (Uspo). “We exceed 4 million per week. We are not far from the records ”, he assures us.

In addition to the increase in contamination and contact cases, there is the implementation of the new school health protocol.

This provides that instead of closing a primary class when a case of Covid-19 is detected there, all the students in this class are tested.

“Since the beginning of the week, I have found myself with about twenty children in the morning waiting in front of the pharmacy with their parents to be screened and to know if they are going to class afterwards,” says Pierre-Olivier Variot, who runs a pharmacy near Dijon.

The latter, also president of the Inspo, estimates that recently the requests for tests have multiplied by 2.5.

"Endless overtime"

Pharmacies must therefore redouble their efforts to manage this influx in addition to other patients who are naturally more numerous in this winter season. "It puts pressure on the staff, the staff is tired," explains Gilles Bonnefond, who notes that pharmacies have become with the health crisis the privileged prevention pole in town to be screened and vaccinated. "It's close to people, there is no need to make an appointment and it's always open," he explains.

“We do endless overtime.

Psychologically and morally it's hard, ”says Pierre-Olivier Variot, who had to reorganize the planning of his pharmacy.

“We cannot match the people we test with those we vaccinate.

So we test in the morning, we vaccinate between noon and two and we test again in the afternoon ”.

But even this system is not always enough and the pharmacist is sometimes obliged to "prioritize people with symptoms and contact cases over those who come to have a valid health pass".

No shortage, but a supply problem

While the supply of tests by laboratories is currently under pressure, pharmacies do not encounter any difficulty in obtaining tests from wholesalers.

"They have stock, you just have to anticipate orders because things go very quickly", assures Gilles Bonnefond.

The union, on the other hand, is asking the government for authorization to be able to perform tests by nasal swab rather than antigen on children under 10.

And Gilles Bonnefond argues: “It is an approved device much less traumatic for children because it is a thicker cotton that we push only two or three centimeters.

It's more effective than a saliva test and you get the results in thirty minutes.

"

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