A Covid-19 patient in an intensive care unit (illustration).

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P.Lopez / AFP

  • Four northerner patients were transferred by helicopter to Germany.

  • If the overall capacity in resuscitation beds in the region is not reached, there are strong tensions in places.

  • Private hospitals and clinics have also made it possible to unload the services of the most busy public hospitals.

The first medical evacuation of a Covid-19 patient took place on Sunday from the Valenciennes hospital center to the critical care department of a German hospital.

Others have taken place in the meantime, from Hauts-de-France, but also from Grand-Est.

Many readers of

20 Minutes

then wondered about the relevance of such operations, stressing that it would have been faster and less expensive to use local private establishments.

This is in fact already largely the case.

To date, and even if the curve of the incidence rate in the region tends to go down, the situation is still very tense in the hospitals of Hauts-de-France.

Contrary to what we observed during the first wave of the coronavirus epidemic, it is mainly establishments in the North that see the most patients with Covid-19 arriving.

On Sunday, for 10,000 people presenting to the emergency services in the North on suspicion of Covid, nearly half were hospitalized.

For the whole region, 504 patients are in intensive care, half of them in the North.

More private patients than in Germany

However, the total capacity of resuscitation beds in the region has not yet been reached, which currently has 747 places.

The problem is that the arrivals of new patients are therefore not evenly distributed.

On Monday, there were about twenty daily admissions in the North, 13 in Pas-de-Calais and only 7 for the other three departments.

Thus, with the help of the Samu, the establishments most in tension therefore organize patient transfers to other hospitals in the region, public or private.

At the end of October, for example, the Roubaix hospital had experienced a very large influx of patients which had led it to transfer about twenty patients to the Lille and Wattrelos CHUs, but also to the private hospital of Villeneuve d'Ascq. and at the Clinique du Val de Lys in Tourcoing.

The Regional Health Agency (ARS) confirms that “these transfers are organized according to the tensions in the hospitals.

The ARS specifies that it can be about transfers "very punctual from a public establishment to a clinic nearby", but that the movements of patients are all the more important as the tensions are great.

Regarding medical evacuations to Germany, the figures are still anecdotal.

This Tuesday, only four patients from Hauts-de-France had been helicoptered across the Rhine.

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  • epidemic

  • Hospital

  • Covid 19

  • Coronavirus