Six patients with Covid-19 were evacuated by military aircraft Friday afternoon from the Grand Est to the Bordeaux metropolis, the second medical evacuation to the New Aquitaine region, found an AFP journalist.
Read also: Coronavirus: 48 patients from the Grand Est evacuated to New Aquitaine this weekend
An A330 medicalized from the Air Force left around 10 a.m. from the military air base of Istres (Bouches-du-Rhône) to reach Mulhouse, with a view to this new patient transfer arrived around 2 p.m. at the airport of Bordeaux-Mérignac, where firemen and Samu ambulances stood by.
Six patients " with Covid-19 from Mulhouse and Colmar " were thus referred, three of them to the Pellegrin and Haut Lévêque sites of the Bordeaux University Hospital, in intensive care, and three others to the Hospital of Instruction of the Armed Forces Robert Piqué, near Bordeaux, detailed in a press release the Bordeaux hospital center. “ Currently they are stable, it has made it possible to transfer but they are in critical condition. They are intubated, ventilated. They all present with pneumonia in Covid ”, explained Professor Matthieu Biais, head of the anesthesia-resuscitation department of the Bordeaux University Hospital during a press briefing.
All have a similar profile: " average age around 50, with overweight, high blood pressure, risk factors that are regularly found in this disease, " he detailed. " These are six very heavy patients that we receive, in order to be able to save them, because if we do not do that, they will not have the capacity to be treated by these means on the Great East ", underlined Daniel Habold, director of public health at the Nouvelle-Aquitaine regional health agency during a telephone press point in the morning.
48 patients transferred on Sunday
" It is the beginning of a great movement of welcome on the region " in the days to come, with " a certain number of rotations on the whole of New Aquitaine" , he specified. Thus, 48 other patients from the Grand Est must be transferred Sunday by medical trains to ten hospitals in the region, in Poitiers, Pau, Bayonne, Angoulême and Niort in particular. " In total with those of today, we will have received in 3 days 54 patients, " announced in the afternoon Michel Laforcade, director general of ARS during a telephone press point.
La Rochelle hospital will thus take care of six patients from Ile-de-France, Grand Est and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté by Monday. The hospital informed AFP on Friday afternoon that it could take two immediately and that it will respond later to receive the other 4. The Limoges University Hospital is also preparing to " welcome by this weekend, the day remains to be determined, 5 or 6 patients, " the hospital told AFP. This is the fourth time since mid-March that the armed forces have deployed the airborne medical evacuation device called Morphée (acronym for " Resuscitation module for patients with high elongation evacuation ") to evacuate patients with Covid-19 in Bas-Rhin towards departments less affected by the epidemic. Six patients have already been transferred to Bordeaux last Saturday.
Designed as a mobile hospital, with medical equipment directly integrated into the hold of an Air Force supply 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 Wednesday by President Emmanuel Macron in order to support the French faced with the epidemic of coronavirus.