Covid: patients transferred from Martinique to Paris to "decongest the hospital"

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"Dramatic" health situation, saturated hospitals ... In Martinique, where a new containment has been put in place for at least three weeks, the strong circulation of the coronavirus epidemic worries, with an incidence rate of 1,040 cases for 100,000 inhabitants.

And faced with the saturation of hospital services, the island transferred on Saturday three first hospitalized patients from Fort-de-France to Paris.

A procedure that had already been applied last March, and for which patients are handpicked. 

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A demanding plane trip

Because the whole difficulty for doctors is to be able to determine which patients can withstand this journey without danger.

"This only concerns patients who are intubated under respiratory assistance, sufficiently stabilized to endure nearly 10 hours, or even 11 hours of travel outside the walls of the hospital", specifies to Europe 1 the doctor Cyrille Chabartier, head of department Covid resuscitation.

The state of health of the three transferred patients had already deteriorated in recent weeks.

It was therefore necessary to ensure that they could withstand this plane trip, with in particular "drier air which will potentially contribute to altering their respiratory state".

Other evacuations to come

To continue to lower hospital pressure, further evacuations should take place over the next few days.

"The idea is rather to make these transfers regularly to relieve congestion in the hospital than to bring a jumbo jet which would be difficult to fill because we would not have transportable candidates", explains Professor Hossein Mehdaoui, the head of the resuscitation center at the Martinique University Hospital. 

On their arrival in Paris on Saturday evening, the patients were evacuated to three hospitals, Pitié-Salpêtrière, Mondor, and Georges-Pompidou.