This was one of the main reasons for the confinement and one of the major objectives of these weeks to “remain[r] in [soi]”This has been going on since early April. The saturation of French hospitals, and in particular of the intensive care units where all the serious cases of coronavirus are found, has been decreasing in France continuously for about twenty days. What started out as a small improvement has become a lasting trend, and the past three weeks suggest that this pace should not stop immediately.
First, there is the crude number of patients present every day in intensive care in France. Every day, this number increases with the “sheave” entries or decreases with the “sheave” outputs, which can be good news (the patient is better) as bad (the patient is deceased). Since the first mention of this indicator in early March, it has continued to climb until it peaked at 7,148 serious cases on April 8. Since then, it’s been the opposite: not a day without the balance being negative.
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As seen above, the recession is slower than the flood. But it follows a constant rhythm, which suggests that it will last. As of Monday evening, 4,608 serious cases were in “sheave” in France, or 64.5% of the peak of April 8. We have therefore come down by a third of the maximum reached thanks, in particular, to another decline started a little earlier: that of new daily admissions to intensive care. There has never been as many as the 1er April (771) and since then this new daily batch of serious cases has been divided several times. Last week it averaged 250. Now, it’s more like 150.
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Fewer daily shifts are, mathematically, fewer serious cases in these services. The infographic above clearly shows that the decline in the first indicator leads to the decline in the other a few days later. Seeing that the number of new serious cases continuing to drop in recent days is therefore a promise to see the curve of total serious cases following the same path in the coming days.
The other positive point of these indicators is that they are not observed only over the whole of France. If we look at the resuscitation services of the country’s two major epicenters, namely Ile-de-France and the four most affected departments of the Grand-Est (Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin, Moselle, Meurthe -and-Moselle), the decrease observed at the national level has not disappeared. In these two areas, the peak in the intensive care unit was reached in early April (see below). Since then, the saturation of these services has decreased, in all the departments concerned.
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These two epicentres were helped by interregional solidarity, which saw resuscitation patients being transferred from the departments of Grand-Est or Ile-de-France to all other corners of the country. But this device does not explain everything. In fact, the decline in the number of daily resuscitation admissions to the two epicentres closely follows the national trend. In Ile-de-France, there have been around 60 new serious cases every 24 hours in recent days, four times less than four weeks ago. In the Grand-Est, the proportions are close.
The challenge, after May 11, will be not to see these upward curves start again. They will, among others, be indicators of successful deconfinement.
Baptiste Bouthier
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