A new wake-up call to the coronavirus epidemic.
According to the president of the national council of the Order of Physicians, France will have to face "a generalized epidemic throughout its territory" for long months, "if nothing changes", he warned in an interview published on Sunday 27 September.
All with a health system "unable to respond to all demands".
"The second wave is coming faster than we feared," said Patrick Bouet in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche, while France is experiencing an upsurge in cases of contamination.
"Wednesday, (the Minister of Health) Olivier Véran chose a language of truth but he has not yet gone far enough. He did not say that, if nothing changes, in three to four weeks, France will have to face, for several long months of autumn and winter, a generalized epidemic throughout its territory, "he added.
The country will not have a "rear base from which to draw human reinforcements, with a health system incapable of responding to all requests," said Patrick Bouet.
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Creation of a "Practice committee" on "organization, logistics"
"What awaits us is a test. But the health professionals, at the origin of the miracle of spring, will not be able to compensate again the structural deficiencies. Many are exhausted, traumatized", he warned.
He regretted that "the assessment of the first period was not made, to better prepare for it".
During the lull, it would have been necessary to "implement a feedback process" by organizing "meetings at the Ministry of Health with all the players in the crisis".
"It was clear that people were going to relax during the holidays and that the summer contaminations of the coasts would feed the urban Covids of September".
The doctor questioned the "technostructure of the Ministry of Health".
According to him, it is "urgent to create a 'practice committee', a kind of counterpart to the scientific council centered on the organization, logistics, concrete, and to endow it with a variation at the level of each department".
"Otherwise, it is the Samu, and therefore the hospital, which will have to manage everything again, with the same traffic jam as in the spring of 15 (the emergency call number - Editor's note), declared the president of the Order, who is a general practitioner. "The city medicine must be able to cooperate well with the hospital".
Worrisome increase in cases and hospitalizations
To avoid a new uncontrolled runaway of the Covid-19 epidemic, the government this week imposed on the main cities of the country a severe turn of the screw, most, including Paris, being now in a reinforced or maximum "alert zone" .
The Covid-19 pandemic continues in France and has intensified in recent weeks.
On Saturday, September 26, the country recorded more than 14,000 new cases in 24 hours, a figure down slightly from the last 48 hours.
But the positivity rate also continues to rise steadily.
The percentage of people infected among those tested for Covid-19 is 7.2%, according to the figure published on Saturday September 26 by Public Health France.
The number of new cases has meanwhile stood at 14,412 in the last 24 hours, against some 16,000 cases every day, Friday and Thursday.
Hospitalizations continue at the same pace.
Over the last seven days, 4,102 new hospitalizations were recorded, including 763 serious cases in intensive care.
Since the start of the epidemic, at least 31,700 people have died from causes related to the coronavirus.
With AFP
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