A fourth airborne medical evacuation will be organized Friday by the armed forces to transfer patients suffering from the coronavirus from Mulhouse to Bordeaux, announced on Thursday evening the Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly.
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"The Airbus A 330 will reproduce as it has done three times an operation which is intended to relieve the hospital in Mulhouse", she declared on the BFM TV channel. Six patients will be transferred to the Bordeaux University Hospital, it was confirmed by those around him. The aircraft will previously link Mulhouse from the military base of Istres.
Mobile hospital
The three previous flights of this so-called Morpheus device (acronym for "Resuscitation module for patients with high evacuation elongation") had made it possible to evacuate patients to Marseille, Toulon or Brittany.
A veritable mobile hospital, with medical equipment directly integrated into the hold of an Air Force refueling plane, this device's primary purpose is to repatriate French soldiers seriously injured in external operations. With the coronavirus crisis, it is the first time that it is used on the national territory.
These evacuations are part of the military operation Resilience announced by President Emmanuel Macron in order to support the French in the face of the coronavirus epidemic. "Operation Resilience has already mobilized several hundred soldiers in the past few days and of course it will gain momentum," said Florence Parly.
"We will respond to requests that will be expressed as close to the ground by the prefects, in the areas and the departments (..) and of course we could consider going up to several thousand" of soldiers engaged, she said. added.
The minister also said that about 400 soldiers were contaminated with Covid-19. "We have no serious cases at this stage and fortunately we have no deaths yet," she said. The armies will be able to continue to carry out their missions with less personnel, via a system of bearings, if necessary, she assured.
"We must be able to continue to come to the rescue of the French, provide a certain number of assistance services (..) and then we must also continue the operations which are ours", whether on national territory with Sentinel for the fight against terrorism or outside theaters, she said.