Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the infectious diseases department at Bichat hospital, calls for “not to fall into psychosis” but to “take the virus seriously” while waiting to see how it spreads outside China.
“They are fine, there were no more signs but we had to wait for there to be no more virus detected”, Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the infectious diseases department at Bichat hospital, said on Thursday February 13 on Franceinfo about two of the eleven patients infected with the new Covid-19 coronavirus in France who were able to leave the hospital on Wednesday, February 12. But the professor and director of the Institute of infectious diseases at Inserm recalls that “cis a new virus with significant transmission. It may not be as bad as we thought in terms of mortality, but we have to take it seriously. “
franceinfo: How are the two patients who, in France, got out of the hospital?
Yazdan Yazdanpanah: They are fine, there were no more signs [d’infection] but we had to wait for there to be no more virus detected. They are out, they are very fit. One of the patients did not have a severe form so he did not have any specific treatment. The other had a more severe form with a resuscitation so we used a specific treatment but everything went well.
There is still a Chinese octogenarian patient who is still being treated at Bichat hospital, in what condition is he?
He is still in intensive care and is still in serious condition. This is a patient with other history. In these patients, the disease is more serious.
Should we be worried about the situation, when we see the latest figures on the mortality of infected patients in China, more than 240 new deaths in 24 hours?
Today we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen so we really have to take this seriously. Afterwards, we must not fall into psychosis and alarmism. It is a new virus with significant transmission. It may not be as bad as we thought in terms of mortality, but we have to take it seriously. The increase in deaths in China must be analyzed over several days to be significant because these are patients who were already very ill. China has taken a number of steps and it takes a fortnight to see if it works. The future of the epidemic will depend on what happens in the other countries of Southeast Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa where China has a lot of interactions. There will be reasons to be optimistic if we manage to control the spread in these areas.
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