Caregivers take turns in the West Indies.
New reinforcements will be sent to Guadeloupe and Martinique on Friday, from where a dozen patients should be evacuated to the metropolis in the coming days, the Ministry of Health said on Wednesday.
The airlift continues to relieve West Indian hospitals saturated with Covid-19 cases.
"A little more than 120" caregivers left Tuesday for Guadeloupe and Martinique, and "other reinforcements arrive Friday", still "evenly distributed between the two islands", according to the ministry.
These health professionals - whose number has not been specified - must "take over" the 240 doctors, nurses and orderlies who arrived last week.
Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly also announced on Monday that more than 100 tonnes of medical oxygen would be sent to the West Indies on Thursday.
Read alsoCovid-19 in the West Indies: six graphics to understand the "dramatic situation" in Guadeloupe and Martinique
At the Guadeloupe CHU, 40% of the beds are now occupied by Covid-19 patients, and the morgue is saturated, Gérard Cotellon, the director general of the CHU told AFP on Wednesday.
The 46 open intensive care beds are occupied and emergencies register up to 80 passages per day, for the Covid only.
"Everyone has Covid, even those whose specialty is far from this type of pathology," said Mr. Cotellon.
New evacuations to the metropolis
New medical evacuations to the metropolis are "being organized for the weekend or the very beginning of next week", in order to relieve congestion in the intensive care services of Pointe-à-Pitre and Fort-de-France. The ministry is considering the transfer of eight patients by wide-body aircraft as part of the “Hippocampus” operation, as well as three other patients in a Falcon jet, whose “departure dates and islands are being set”.
The director general of the Regional Health Agency in Guadeloupe Valérie Denux indicated at a press conference that the medical evacuations would "strengthen" in the coming weeks. At the start of next week, "we will do another rotation and we will then speed up the medical evacuations as needed because the wave is very strong and is catching up with us," she added, anticipating several evacuations per week. This device is "more than necessary to relieve the services of the CHU", noted Valérie Denux: "We have opened 86 intensive care beds throughout the territory and 82 are occupied. However, we have 5 to 7 entries per day ”.
The incidence rate for all ages could have reached a peak (at an extremely high level) in Martinique but also in Guadeloupe.
# Covid19
1/3 pic.twitter.com/DgvTdttEH2
- Nicolas Berrod (@nicolasberrod) August 18, 2021
Between August 9 and 15, Guadeloupe recorded 7,276 new cases.
On the vaccination side, 32% of Guadeloupe residents over 18 have received a first injection, while only 20.9% have a complete vaccination course.
Since the start of the fourth epidemic wave, at least 36 Covid-19 patients hospitalized in critical care have been transferred to another region, including nineteen from the West Indies to Île-de-France.
This count, stopped Tuesday evening, also includes transfers from Occitanie (14) and Corsica (3) to Hauts-de-France, Grand-Est and Brittany. The list continues to grow: on Wednesday the Nancy University Hospital announced on Twitter the imminent arrival of patients from Perpignan.