REPORTAGE – Pushing the walls, juggling obstacles and, above all, providing patients with the best care: during the pandemic, the hospital did everything to cope. “Le Figaro” spent a week in the middle of a storm during the second wave, and invites you to go back.
In the emergency room, in intensive care, in the biology laboratories, in the maternity ward or in the morgue… During the Covid-19 pandemic, the disease was everywhere in the hospital. Sick followed sick, forcing caregivers to adopt a frantic pace and sometimes to show incredible imagination and flexibility to adapt to the situation.
In November 2020, vaccines against Covid-19 did not yet exist (in France, the very first injection was given at the end of December) and Europe was facing the second epidemic wave with more than 1.5 million cases per week. and 5,000 daily deaths, more than during the first. While France was confined for the second time, “Le Figaro” spent a week in a hospital to tell you how each of the departments took care of the sick.
Resuscitation, the heart of the reactor
Here, every morning, we count: how many beds available, how many patients waiting for a place… Beeps, protective clothing to be put on before entering each room, very weakened patients who must be taken infinite care and deaths galore, intensive care units are at the center of the Covid storm. Particularities of the second wave: the disease is better known, care better codified; but the support felt at the start of the pandemic has disappeared and doctors are accused of a thousand horrors by a small but virulent fraction of the population.
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Emergencies on the verge of rupture
« He’s not 30 years old, I’m going to fight to find him a place in the sheave. » Many emergency workers around the world have been forced to pronounce this sentence. Throughout the pandemic, emergency rooms are overwhelmed by patients gasping for air. Divided into two sectors (one for Covid patients, the other for everything else), they then do what they can to find places for these very fragile patients, sometimes young, in services more capable of taking them into care. charge.
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In the Covid services, such a long stay…
Pediatricians, gynecologists, orthopedists, oncologists… All specialties are putting on their beginner’s coats to come to the bedside of Covid patients. « I feel like an intern… », tells us the Dr Noémie Perez, head of the pediatrics department, came to lend a hand in one of the seven Covid units opened in Valenciennes during the second wave. Some choices are difficult. Does this patient have a chance of surviving in intensive care or is it better to leave his place to someone else?
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Biologists and pharmacists, these shadow fighters
These are services hidden in the bowels of the hospital, and which the patient never sees. And yet, they are extremely in demand during the pandemic: testing ever more, juggling shortages, responding to requests from everywhere… At the biology laboratory of the CH of Valenciennes, ingenuity is required, the operation of the machines does not sometimes… just a paper clip used to close them!
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In the maternity ward, between health imperatives and maintaining the parent-baby bond
Children were not the first affected by Covid. But for some, the situation was dramatic. Ambre, a little girl born prematurely, was infected when she had just returned home after three weeks in the neonatology. « I was told that she was going to be put in solitary confinement, that I would have to leave the hospital and would no longer be able to see her, says his mother. A heartbreak… I collapsed, I did nothing but cry for several days.”
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In the morgue, the puzzle of final goodbyes
Photograph the deceased? A funny idea from another age, almost all of us would have thought a few years ago. But the Covid pandemic is also the story of a paradox: while we only talk about the sick and the dead, we can no longer come and see them in the hospital… How, then, can we do our part? grief ? In Valenciennes, we found an original solution with a mobile team of mortuary agents coming to the departments to carry out a final wash and photograph the deceased.
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