The lull will have been brief. After the summer 2021 rush on tests, then driven by the rebound of the epidemic in France due to the Delta variant and the implementation of the health pass, queues have reappeared in front of pharmacies for nearly two months. The fault, in part, with the eruption of the Omicron variant, much more contagious than its cousin Delta, and which has prompted millions of French people to come and have their nostrils tweaked.
“Right now we are at 200 tests a day. It has gone down since the arrival of self-tests, but until recently we were doing up to 500 daily”, testifies Stéphanie Borgel, pharmacist in the Saint-Paul district, in Paris. A tsunami. Between January 3 and 9, nearly twelve million Covid-19 screenings – including around eight million antigenic tests – were carried out in France. Twice as much as during the peak of the previous wave in August 2021. And with more than 90% of antigenic tests to their credit, pharmacies in France have become real screening machines.
A helping hand that the pharmacists had to take, not without some difficulty. Between the recruitment of additional staff to cope with the increased activity, the training of testers, and the administrative paperwork to bill for screenings, “we no longer have time to advise customers”, regrets, a few kilometers further, Florence Fuks behind her counter. To the point that in some pharmacies, boxes of drugs waiting to be put on the shelves are accumulating. “It impacts the management of the pharmacy and our usual activities. We arrive earlier and we finish later », recognizes Georges Laquintinie, in this other pharmacy in the capital.
Since they were allowed to “take” in October 2020, the crowds in pharmacies skyrocketed. ” At the moment, pharmacies are ordering antigen tests every two days,” observes Audrey Lecoq, associate manager of Pharmazon, a purchasing group with more than 1,800 client pharmacies. She also notes a surge in demand for FFP2 masks since the start of the year.
No question of being taxed as “war profiteers”
The pharmacies benefit from their good reputation with customers, who are already accustomed to picking up their prescriptions there, and who feel confident there. “Activity has jumped by 30% to 40% on average”, said Gilles Bonnefond, spokesperson for the Union of Community Pharmacists (USPO). At the same time, sales of non-Covid-19 medicines and health products, which had fallen in the first months of the pandemic, have more or less regained their pre-crisis levels.
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