According to the Pasteur Institute, intensive care beds will be filled in Paris before the end of the month, French left-wing daily Le Monde reports. Meanwhile, French authorities have placed the Paris region on maximum virus alert.
On Tuesday, the French Health Ministry said that in the Ile-de-France region, which essentially consists of Paris and its surrounding municipalities, had more than 40 percent of intensive care units already occupied by patients with severe forms of Covid-19 disease.
New restrictions have now come into effect in restaurants and higher education institutions in Paris. In the country as a whole, the daily number of new coronavirus cases has been above 10,000 for almost three weeks, and the number of confirmed infections has risen to a total of 634,763 on Tuesday, second only in Europe to Spain. The number of fatalities has risen by 66 in the past 24 hours to 32,365.
Although French President Emmanuel Macron has promised €100 million to fight Covid-19, but given the severe progression of the disease, that funding number may be short of what the country needs to handle the crisis. Macron, who is already widely seen as having bungled the coronavirus crisis, has admitted in the past that the country was unprepared for the first wave of the coronavirus crisis.
Currently, the number of people in hospital care has also increased by 104 since Monday. There are currently 7,398 infected people in need of hospital care, including 1,426 on respirators, whose number has risen by 11 since Monday and by nearly 1,000 in the past month.
The situation is most severe in Paris and the suburbs, where 40.1 percent of intensive care units are infected with coronavirus. On Monday, the rate was only 37 percent, representing a three-percentage point increase in a single day.
This means that in the most densely populated region of France — a metropolitan area of 12 million inhabitants — there are 2,393 infected people in hospital, 449 of whom are in the intensive care unit, representing a third of the serious patients in the country.
Experts expect that within a few days, half of the intensive care beds in the capital will have coronavirus patients, and by the end of the month the intensive care units will be full and there will be no free respirators. Gearing up for that critical scenario, some hospitals have already begun to postpone non-emergency surgical interventions.
Hospital data is a key indicator in the evolution of the epidemic, as the primary goal of epidemiological restrictions is to ensure that hospitals are not overburdened with coronavirus infections and that institutions are able to care for those suffering from other diseases as well.
Most epidemics are currently developing in universities, so the number of students in classrooms and lecturers at the same time in higher education institutions has been halved, and to prevent evening entertainment, bars in Paris will not open at all for at least the next two weeks.
