A cathedral silence reigns here. The corridors are long, white, sanitized, bathed in an ugly artificial light. Time, as the world outside celebrates the new year, seems to have slowed down in this windowless space. And yet, why do we feel this sensation of presence? Because life is there, surely. Present, of course, but so fragile, so on the edge, that we must be silent and concentrate to discern this bit of breath which still passes, this heart which struggles to continue beating, in the face of death whose shadow cannot be seen. asks only to stretch out to win.
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“We are in total uncertainty”
The intensive care unit at the Hôpital Nord Franche-Comté (HNFC) is the one that receives the most critical cases, when one or more vital functions are failing and medical assistance and monitoring must be continuous. This evening of December 31 is not the worst, far from it. It is even a form of pause if you consider the storms that hospital staff have been through for two years.
The current rate of admissions is stable, with one or two people per day, compensated by exits from the service. The hospital has ten or so Covid patients, for a little more than 80 hospitalized Covid patients. And there are positive points: the proportion of people who die from Covid is much lower than in the past and the average length of stay in shuttles is decreasing, which makes it possible to ease the pressure on the service.
But dark clouds are on the horizon. “We are in the most total uncertainty”, confides Pascal Mathis, the director of the hospital.
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Fear of the coming week
For the moment, patients hospitalized in sheaves are affected by the Delta variant. It takes about three weeks for the state of health of a patient infected with Covid to deteriorate to the point of being admitted to intensive care. So the wave of Omicron cases is only coming and next week will be the moment of truth.
“I just learned this Friday evening that the Territory of Belfort had gone from an incidence of 500 to 700 cases per 100,000 inhabitants”, specifies, during his visit to the service on the evening of the 31st, Jean-Marie Girier, the prefect of the department, who thinks that it is still necessary to fear an almost doubling of this rate within ten days.
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Expected ramp-up
The hospital held a crisis meeting just before the weekend. No one knows at this time what proportion of people infected with Omicron will need to be admitted. Many patients are vaccinated and have attenuated forms, but the number of positive people is such that a surge is still possible, mainly among the part of the population not yet vaccinated. “I think that we will have the first trends on Sunday evening,” predicts Dr Sylvain Malfroy, deputy head of the service unit.
No one among the designers of hospitals had imagined the hypothesis of a long-lasting epidemic such as the one we have suffered for two years. “We haven’t been trained for that either. We had to adapt, ”recognizes Pascal Mathis. The Trévenans hospital, which is new, however benefits from a modern design which has proved to be very effective: the grouping of all the beds in one place. Elsewhere, and in particular in CHUs, these beds are dispersed between departments, sometimes being very far from each other. The regrouping of resources is much more effective when it is necessary to increase in power, which will be the case.
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