Hospitals in Paris are beginning to see signs of hope as the virus surges

Pedaling and dry cough (hacks, hacks, and sequelae of hacks in a personal battle with COVID-19), doctors rush back to a hospital crisis meeting over the darkness of Paris before dawn. In February, the disease carried away the first disease in Europe that killed more than 250,000 people.

Nine months later, life-saving chief Philip Montlaver and 150 doctors and nurses he led at the towering Bisha Hospital in Paris became experts on their enemies.That knowledge has proven to be invaluable against the second deadly surge. Virus It could once again overwhelm the European healthcare system.

As his lungs are still congested, he and his team have made progress in their care since fighting a wave of horrific early cases last spring, splattering when pedaled. Learn more about treatment advances that are helping chat and other hospitals. Better to resist new infection streams. February’s Bichat was the first hospital Outside Asia to record the deaths of people infected with the virus: 80-year-old tourist from China.

“In the first wave, people didn’t dare to come to the hospital. They were scared and afraid to get infected,” recalls Montlaver. “When they arrived, they were exhausted and stuck on their last leg, so we intubated and ventilated.”

Currently, there are steroid treatments that were not available to Bichat doctors in the first surge. They also learned to avoid ventilating the patient as much as possible, instead awakening and oxygenating the patient and distributing through a face mask instead of an invasive tube. The sick are also familiar with the need for early detection of symptoms, making treatment easier.

Taken together, these and other advances mean that patients spend days in life-saving emergency rather than weeks and are more alive.

“We won about 15 days in their care and the mortality rate was cut in almost half,” says Montlaver.

The picture is reflected all over the country. In France, more patients are currently hospitalized for the virus than at the peak of April in the first wave, Intensive care.. The situation remains dire, with one in four people in France associated with COVID-19 and the country again largely blocked. However, the hospital seems to hold and is capable of surviving the surge that is expected to dominate France in the coming days.

“The system is on the verge of cracking, but at the same time there is some hope at the end of the tunnel,” says Montlaver.

At another major hospital in Paris, anesthesiologist Damian Vaillant Foulquier is also beginning to believe that the wave of infection will be forgotten.

When the system was suffering from a case of coronavirus in the spring, he was switched from his professional job of putting people to sleep for surgery and instead in the intensive care unit, which involved intubating the patient into the respiratory tract. Was thrown into the battle.

However, even if the number of cases snowballs, he has not been drafted this time and can continue to care for patients other than COVID-19. Liver transplant And cancer surgery.

“From September to October, I and most of my colleagues were confident that we would return to ICU,” he said. “But for now, it’s not.”

Bichat was also able to secure more resources for life-saving non-viral treatments.

From March to April, a hospital specializing in heart-lung transplants stopped about two-thirds of surgery to free up space and staff for virus patients, according to Montlaver. This time, only one-third of the surgery has been postponed. Even if the team fought the virus surge, what went ahead included lung transplants last week and the week before.

The illuminated towers of Notre Dame are approaching the bright sky as Montlaver steps into the morning meeting. There, he and the managers of other hospitals discuss the best way to split beds and personnel. One of the questions he asks himself when he rides is what will last for the next 48 hours? Does he need to suspend more operating rooms in order to divert additional resources to the fight against the virus?

“The hospital situation is complicated because we don’t know exactly where to go,” he says.

From my personal experience, Montlaver is doubly aware of how viruses can cause nasty surprises. He and his wife, who also work in the hospital, collapsed with fever, headaches, pain and cough, “completely destroyed for two weeks” when they became infected. He lost 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of muscle and is now trying to get it back on his bike.

But the good news of his morning ride was that the night before was calm in his critical care department.They adopted only one addition Coronavirus Patient, 70-year-old woman with dyspnea.They still had a spare bed in the remodeled operating room Critical care Used in case of a sudden avalanche of a virus. So far, they weren’t needed.

“It’s not an overwhelming tide, as we expected,” he said. “Things aren’t as bad as I expected a month ago, and not so bad.”

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