Politics
Lockdown-free Paris hospitals buckling with Covid patients as London cases plummet thanks to world-beating jab rollout
HOSPITALS in Paris are buckling under the number of Covid patients while cases in London plummet thanks to the UK’s vaccine rollout.
Health bosses in the Paris region ordered hospitals on Monday to cancel 40 per cent of their regular activities but the area – and the rest of France – will not be put into lockdown.
Staff treating a Covid patient in an intensive care unit at the Melun-Senart hospital, near Paris[/caption]
Londoners out and about in the sunshine[/caption]
In the Paris region, which accounts for about one-sixth of France’s population, the number of people with Covid in intensive care is at its highest since November.
At Melun Hospital Centre, about 31 miles, southeast of Paris, staff said they were at full stretch trying to monitor all the patients with the virus in the intensive care unit.
“With intensive care beds, in our region, and in certain other regions, we’re starting to be close to capacity,” said Dr. Moncef Monchi, head of the intensive care unit.
The number of people treated in intensive care units for Covd in France reached a 14.5 -week-high on Monday at 3,849, nearly a thousand of which were in the Paris region.
Meanwhile in London, Covid cases fell by at least a third in a week in 22 boroughs, official figures show.
Five boroughs have even-day rate of less than 30 confirmed new infections per 100,000 in a week.
The lowest seven-day rate was in Lewisham, on 23.9, in the week to March 3, while Bromley had a rate of 25.6, Islington 26, Camden 28.9 and Haringey 29.4.
France is continuing to resist a lockdown and plans floated by the government of Paris to bring in restrictions appear to have got nowhere.
The country’s top Covid specialist Jerome Salomon said on Tuesday: “A lockdown in the greater Paris region is not on the agenda.
A woman being vaccinated in France, where take up of the jab has so far been low[/caption]
“Lockdown is a last resort measure that would be submitted to the government and the president if we were under the impression the hospital system could not cope.”
France’s Covid vaccination campaign has speeded up considerably, with more than half a million people getting the jab in the past three days.
That means 5.56 per cent of the French population has now had the vaccine, a similar figure to Germany and Italy but lagging way behind the nearly 33 per cent of Brits who’ve been vaccinated.
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France’s health ministry has there had been “feeble” uptake of the life-saving Oxford vaccine, despite the encouraging recent figures.
The slow pace of vaccine take up in France was not helped by President Emmanuel Macron himself claiming the jab was “quasi-ineffective on people older than 65, some say those 60 years or older”.
Regulators earlier this month finally gave the go-ahead for AstraZeneca jab for older people with underlying health issues in an embarrassing u-turn for Macron.
