According to Bruno Lina, professor of virology at the University Hospital of Lyon and at the International Center for Research in Infectious Disease, France is “rather in working order” to face a possible epidemic of coronavirus.
Bruno Lina, professor of virology at the CHU de Lyon and the International Center for Infectious Disease Research, believes that French hospitals are “rather in working order “ and that France is “ready“to fight effectively against this new coronavirus from China, where nearly 1,300 cases and 41 deaths have been recorded since December.
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In France, three cases have been confirmed, two in Paris and one in Bordeaux, three people who recently stayed in China. They have been taken care of by hospitals, which are ready to welcome others, according to the specialist.
franceinfo: Would you say, like Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn, that France is ready to face a greater number of cases?
Bruno Lina: Indeed, we are rather in working order with regard to case management. You know that since the viral and bacterial emergencies that we have had since 2003, a whole series of organizations have been put in place so that hospitals are equipped with isolation rooms, so as to accommodate these patients in good conditions and to avoid transmitting the disease to other people. And then there is a network of laboratories that have a number of common characteristics, allowing it to perform analyzes practically in real time. Finally, there is all the routing that is stalled: center 15, emergencies and circuits in hospitals. So we’re ready, yes. And the reference hospitals can adapt: at the CHU de Lyon, for example, we have the capacity to change the structure so as to block an entire wing of the service in a vacuum zone.
Agnes Buzyn says that we will go back to all the people who met these three patients. Is it really possible?
It is a job done by the epidemiologists of Public Health France, and it is a job that they are used to doing. You know that when we have patients who present pathologies linked to serious viruses or bacteria, we take this step. It is very important to do so in order to contain this epidemic. Where we are probably lucky, but that remains to be confirmed is that we are infectious only when we are symptomatic, we know that this was the case for SARS and for other coronaviruses. This means that an incubator is unlikely to transmit the disease. It is only when he is sick that he becomes contaminating, and it is easier to find people over this shorter period.
Can we cure this coronavirus and how?
There have been 1,300 cases and 41 deaths: this means that 1,260 people have healed, or will heal. Our immune system allows us to heal in the vast majority of cases of these respiratory viruses. This is not always enough, since we see that there are severe forms and that some deaths are observed. But we are not all equal before this virus: preliminary data currently show that children are not affected. We have extremely few, if any, children and even young adults under the age of 25, since we have virtually no cases. There are many simple forms of this infection. In the case of severe forms, these are people with more fragile chronic, cardiac, respiratory, neurological pathologies. This ties in a little with what we observe with the flu. These are the most fragile people who risk making more complicated shapes and possibly dying.
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