There we are. We turn it into the world after that.
The economy will restart, or not. The restaurants re-open, or not. The clusters are dispersed, or not. Patients with persistent signs of Covid well beyond twenty days, are a specialized consultation for the support, or not.
And in town, in our offices, we’re seeing patients who, for some, after three and a half months of interruption of their follow-up, are finally ready to relaunch the complementary examinations, to push the investigations put in standby mode during the pandemic. Has a retail ready.
We are rinsed. I’m rinsed off. Many of my colleagues are rinsed. Gps, nurses, those who have held the line in the city are very much on the knees. Of course, this probably depends of the regions, of the presence or absence of a strong circulation of the virus during these long weeks, but we’re rinsed.
We cared for Covid, thought Covid, read Covid, learned Covid, managed Covid, during all these weeks. And we find ourselves sometimes in front of the people who go out of containment forced having the impression that, during this long interval, life stopped. The them, probably. Ours, not at all.
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I worked more than usual, incorporating the changes required, teleconsultation, the decrease in the number of consultations in face-to-face, disinfection, measures, barriers, precise timing to ensure that patients do not intersect in the waiting room. All this in an atmosphere of anxiety provoking, especially in the first weeks. Nothing to see, of course, with the experiences of my colleagues from the east of France, who took the first wave of the full-blown, nor with the lived experience of the hospital in the emergency services, and resuscitation in particular. But I approach the month of June, in a poor state. And sometimes, I find it hard to hide my irritation when a patient drops his surgical mask to blow off air is heard : “Oh dear, these things, me at the end of ten minutes I can no longer stand.” The masque FFP2 that I wear on a daily basis since the beginning of march, mask, skillfully my grin. Or when another tells me : “Oh I did not put a mask because I came only for you.”
Alerted by my colleagues, I listened to the entire hearing of Olivier Véran in front of the social affairs committee of the Senate. I appreciated the quality of his speech, his quick mind, his ability to address the various subjects on which it is questioned, the situation in Guyana until the lengthening of the period of support for the LDCS for the women who have been impacted by the Covid. Those who blamed the shutdown routine in all institutions on march 6, with for consequence a decline of support for many patients non-Covid, he argued skillfully that the result was empty the services and prepare health care providers on the wave, and took the example of Italy which had not had the chance, with, for consequence, the overflow immediate capacity of resuscitation in Lombardy.
On the vast majority of subjects, it has been good, and I groaned, imagining Agnès Buzyn his place in a parallel world where Benjamin Griveaux would have kept for him his erections in the morning.
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But first, on the crucial issue of masks, it was clearly implied that it would not respond. The issue of masks was “a problem of collective management”, and hence there was no question that it makes the slightest comment on those who had preceded him in his position. “When I arrived, there were 120 million surgical masks in the stock State. […] I see no fault policy, or individual, but a problem of collective management of pilotage.” He continued pretending to consider : “Is this a billion and a half of protective masks would have been enough to equip the general population ? Yes, for 5 to 6 days.” Cleverly, he was no longer a question here of detail between surgical masks or FFP2, and claim that this billion masks would have been squandered in less than a week is a nice trick, to the extent that this billion masks would have greatly changed the life of all carers in the country. Similarly, he did not stop to explain that the scientific doctrine had ceased to change during the pandemic, and that it was too easy to judge a posteriori : “It is often and willingly judged in the light of the elements of which each other have when they are judging you and, more rarely, in the light of the state of the science at the time where you make the decisions.” And Veran to rely on the advice of the WHO, to its scientific advisory board… without ever, of course, refer to the work of doctors in the field. For months the general stop-postillons.fr inform the population and to advise him to sew masks for the port in the general population, or warn about the risk of aerosolization, in the light of the study of the patterns of contamination in China and the USA.
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But it is at the end of his speech that the Wine drives the point of denial. Questioned by senator Martine Berthet on the lack of masks for the liberal doctors, the minister said : “The use of the medicine city has been extremely low, much lower that what was expected.” I recall here that the government belongs to Olivier Veran has done everything to hide as much as possible the number of health care workers infected with or who died from Covid. That by the force of things, it was more difficult for some colleagues who are elderly or fragile, consult with their patients without the masks. And yet, all around me, the vast majority of the colleagues was on the bridge, involved in the functioning of the centre Covid, taking care of their patients, thanks to the tele-consultation. This denial of the presence of the medicine of the city on the ground is also in contradiction with a survey conducted in early may, in which 92% of doctors and 97% of nurses liberals claimed to continue their activity during the pandemic. Of course, it is declarative, and we can imagine that are over-represented the most active, but make a link between the deliberate choice to organize the shortage due to the lack of strategic stock, and a supposed desertion of the medicine of city, is absolutely pitiful. And if I had advice to give to my brother in hospital, this would be to abandon the edifice of self-justification built on this lie original, which will not hold up to the examination of the documents. All that this lie-induced, alas, in some liberals, not the most sharpened of the drawer, a rancor towards the hospital. “Masks, masks, one hears it all the time. It is we who would have trusté masks”, I said to Stella, 39 years old, an emergency physician in a large hospital. “All in all, we had two masks FFP2 per day across the service, one for the doctor who intube, one for the nurse who help. And when we had used in the morning, we kept religiously in a corner in case they needed to reuse it in the day.”
We are all rinsed out. Doctors and nurses from city, caregivers, and hospital executives. And while many want to forget the pandemic which continues to spread in Africa and in America, we see come the summer. The summer of the world after. The summer of all the dangers.
Christian Lehmann physician and writer
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