“If we do not act quickly, we risk a very important overflow” in Ile-de-France, alerted Professor Djillali Annane, head of the intensive care unit at Raymond Poincaré hospital in Garches (Hauts-de-Seine), guest of franceinfo on Sunday February 28. In Ile-de-France hospitals, “every day we feel the tension gradually and inexorably rising” with “mostly patients with the British variant” for 15 days, he explains. According to him, hospitals have already exceeded their “normal capacity of intensive care beds”.
franceinfo: What is the situation in your department today?
Professor Djillali Annane: The situation is sadly similar to that of several days ago. That is to say that the occupancy rate in Ile-de-France today is more than 70% of intensive care patients affected by Covid-19. These are severe forms, mostly of the British variant. Every day we feel the tension rising gradually and inexorably. What has really changed is the profile of the patients, that is to say that, for about a fortnight now, we have fallen into a situation where we mainly have patients affected by the British variant. .
And how should you adapt in your departments? Are there transfers between establishments?
For now, we have not operated a transfer, but already in Ile-de-France, a region-wide regulation has been put in place for a few days, so as to try to delay as late as possible the moment when we will all be saturated. Today, we have already exceeded our normal capacity for intensive care beds in the Ile-de-France region. We are using our reserve, we see it dwindling day by day.
In several hospitals, we have opened new beds to try to take care of as many patients as possible. This reserve is made up of resuscitation beds which are not traditional resuscitation beds, which are so-called ephemeral beds. And we know that the care of patients in these beds is not optimal. So, today we are in a situation of degraded patient care which is worsening day by day and it is really urgent that we can reverse this situation.
How to turn the situation around? “The curfew is working very well”, according to the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salomon. Would you say the same?
What we see is that the number of contaminations is inexorably increasing. You should know that you have about one in 100 infected people who land in intensive care. You can see that we have a constant increase in the number of infections every day, and therefore a constant increase in the number of patients admitted to intensive care despite the curfew. So we see that the measures currently in force in Ile-de-France will not help unblock the situation, will not allow the contaminations curve to be reversed. And if we do not act quickly from now on, we risk a very significant overflow.
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