From the start of the containment, hotels had volunteered to welcome medical staff, the homeless, truckers and vulnerable people. Some will now go further and house patients with Covid-19. The objective: to isolate patients with mild forms of the disease, who do not require, or no longer, hospitalization, so that they avoid contaminating their loved ones.
This solution had been advocated by the Academy of Medicine as early as April 10. To avoid transmission of the virus, the institution recommended “that hotel establishments (or other similar places of residence) be made available to regional health agencies to welcome, until clinical recovery and negativation of the tests. viral detection, patients with simple or moderate forms of Covid-19, or convalescent from this disease. "
A pilot site already launched
The motion has been heard. So far, only a few hotels have agreed to welcome patients, such as the Ibis budget in Poitiers (Vienne) or the Première Classe in Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales). But the collaboration between the Accor group, the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) and local authorities will give new impetus to the movement, at least in Île-de-France.
A pilot site has already been launched, the Ibis budget at Porte de la Chapelle (Paris XVIII), which welcomed its first patients on Monday evening. Two other establishments are ready to receive them: the Ibis de Porte de Bagnolet (twentieth) and that of Porte de Bercy (XIIth). The hospitals concerned are Pitié-Salpêtrière (Paris XIII), Bichat (Xe), Louis-Mourier in Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine) and Avicenne in Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), as well as the municipal health center d 'Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis).
Who will pay the bill?
The placement in hotel rooms is one of the measures of a more global project, called "Covisan", which "aims to avoid a new wave of serious patients and be able to secure the prospect of deconfinement" according to the AP-HP. The rooms are made available at cost and reception is on a voluntary basis, "especially if it appears necessary to offer accommodation solutions to people whose conditions of isolation at home would not guarantee the absence of transmission of the virus ”, specifies the regional health agency of Île-de-France.
They are therefore not medical rooms. Who will pay the bill? Mystery. If the AP-HP claims to be "the principal" of this experiment, it did not respond to our requests on the issue, as did the ARS and the town hall of Paris. For his part, Sébastien Bazin, the CEO of the Accor group, assured last week on France Inter that he did not know anything about it.
Complicated for independent hotels…
Accor, which has already taken such an initiative in China and Spain and of which 75% of hotels in France are closed, does not intend to stop there. He gave an overview of the owners of his establishments to find out if they agreed to accommodate the sick. Over 300 responded positively. These placements will obviously have to meet a significant need, not all regions of France being affected in the same way by the pandemic.
The phenomenon is therefore likely to gain momentum in the coming weeks, particularly from May 11 and the theoretical beginning of deconfinement. "People who test positive will be isolated at home, with a strict obligation for themselves and their loved ones not to go out, or at a hotel," declared Prime Minister Édouard Philippe on April 19. But it is especially the large hotel groups that will be on the bridge. "There are very serious constraints to welcoming patients," says Franck Delvaux, president of the Ile-de-France region of the Union of Trades in the Hotel Industry (Umih). An independent cannot do that… ”
