Paris (AFP)

France has "always followed international recommendations" concerning the wearing of masks in the fight against the coronavirus, defended Tuesday the Director General of Health Jérôme Salomon, who had deemed it "useless in the street" in March.

"The whole world was surprised by this unprecedented, massive, brutal, global crisis," he stressed before the commission of inquiry on the coronavirus at the National Assembly, defending the authorities' strategy on the masks and testing, as well as the country's preparedness efforts for this type of health crisis.

Jérôme Salomon, who has led the branch of the Ministry of Health responsible for managing health crises since 2018, opened the ball of questions for MEPs within the framework of this commission set up to "learn the lessons" of managing the epidemic from Covid-19.

"You are one of the faces of this crisis", underlined the deputy LR Eric Ciotti, rapporteur of the commission, recalling that the daily press points of this specialist in infectious diseases had "punctuated the life of the French during the confinement".

Many questions revolved around the masks, which, underlined Eric Ciotti "were at the heart of the questions of our fellow citizens and carers".

Jérôme Salomon has traced the chronology of the strategic state stocks of these masks, ordered massively at the time of the threat of the H1N1 flu and then destroyed in part after a 2017 audit which concluded that a majority of them were in poor condition. An order for 100 million masks was then placed at the end of 2018, with the decision to move "towards a dynamic, rotating stock", rather than a massive "dormant" stock.

But with the onset of the pandemic in France, the needs for carers rose suddenly from 3 to 5 million per week to 30 or even 40 million, while all countries also saw their needs increase and that the main producing country, the China saw its economy paralyzed, he said.

As for masks for the general public, "we have always followed international recommendations", assured the Director General of Health, accused by Jean-Christophe Lagarde (UDI) of "state lie" for having assured on March 18 that 'there was "no sense in wearing this mask" in the street "for uncontaminated people".

"The WHO hesitated a lot and does not recommend wearing the mask under certain conditions until June 5," he added, also highlighting a recent study expressing "doubts about the effectiveness of large masks public".

Regarding screening tests, he defended the end of systematic screening on March 14 in favor of "syndromic surveillance" and a diagnosis based on symptoms, explaining that this did not change anything in the care of patients .

According to him, the WHO invitation on March 16 to "test (r) each suspected Covid case" was aimed more at the countries "that did not have access to the tests" at that time.

Jérôme Salomon also assured that "no national decision" had been taken concerning the relevance of hospitalizing or not the residents of Ehpad with coronavirus.

It is always an "individual approach by medical teams", who decide "whether or not there is a benefit" for the patient to be hospitalized or admitted to intensive care.

More than a third of the approximately 30,000 deaths linked to the epidemic took place in nursing homes.

© 2020 AFP