Coronavirus: patient evacuations and roadside checks continue in France

Faced with an assessment which jumped to more than 7,500 dead in France, evacuations to relieve hospitals in Île-de-France will continue, Sunday, April 5, as controls to maintain the containment effort despite the holidays and the weekend.

New Ile-de-France patients with Covid-19 will be transferred on board two medical trains in Brittany, according to the Brittany Regional Health Agency.

"After having welcomed six patients from Haut-Rhin on March 25 and on April 1, 36 patients from Île-de-France, several dozen patients from Ile-de-France will be transferred to Brittany," explains ARS.

>> Read: Coronavirus in France: decline in daily hospital mortality

In total, according to the DGS, more than 550 patients in critical condition have been evacuated since March 18.

While the peak of the epidemic is "approaching", according to the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salmon, the French, confined since March 17, are invited not to relax the effort and to spend the holidays at home Easter, which started this weekend.

"No relaxation, stay at home"

"No relaxation, stay at home," urged AP-HP director general Martin Hirsch, deploring the presence of "too many people in the streets, too many strollers, too many walkers" in Paris, crossed by caregivers on their way to work.

During the @aphp evening crisis meeting, concern shared by all those who had gone to Parisian hospitals: they had encountered too many people in the streets, too many walkers, too many strollers. No relaxation #RestezChezVous @prefpolice @Anne_Hidalgo

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said on Saturday that it was "impossible" to know when students could return to class. Once the containment is lifted, it will take "several days" to organize a gradual return to school, after a complete cleaning of the establishments, and "perhaps not everywhere at the same time", underlined the minister.

Since Friday, the start of the school holidays in zone C which brings together the academies of Île-de-France and Occitanie, more than 160,000 police and gendarmes have been mobilized, and for the whole weekend, to enforce the measures of confinement.

"Departures on vacation, which were a little feared, are generally postponed to a later date," said Captain Sylvain Guilhon, who participated in the surveillance system of the gendarmerie around Bordeaux, by helicopter.

With AFP

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