Early next week, a large-capacity Covid-19 screening center should open on the Alain-Savary esplanade in Toulouse, near the Grand-Rond. A site that is part of the “strengthening plan” of testing capacities announced by the government when the time slots to be able to be tested are rare and that the queues in front of laboratories and pharmacies sometimes endless.
“A second high-capacity screening site is still being studied. Every day in Toulouse, we carry out 8,000 to 10,000 PCR tests and around 30% are positive and this has been going on for weeks, this is a level never reached ”, assures Richard Fabre, president of Regional Union of Biological Health Professionals (URPS) from Occitania.
Since the start of the year, more than 800,000 PCR or antigen tests have been carried out each week in the region, a record. If they manage to cope thanks to “the industrialization of processes and the establishment of a night shift”, they are also affected by the epidemic and are confronted with “15 to 20% absenteeism” , explains their spokesperson. And they are also struggling to find samplers.
“Spectacular progress”
It must be said that Occitania, like the rest of France, is currently affected by “an epidemic of exceptional magnitude, with incidence rates which are unmatched compared to what we have known since the beginning. of the pandemic, ”said Pierre Ricodeau, director of the Regional Health Agency, on Thursday.
[#Covid19] In a few weeks, the epidemic progressed dramatically in Occitania. The whole region is affected, with a record of contaminations among the youngest. Pierre Ricordeau CEO @ARS_OC presented today to the press a new regional update. pic.twitter.com/g2Le2XrtSp
— ARS Occitanie (@ARS_OC) January 13, 2022
As of Wednesday, the average incidence rate was 2,281 per 100,000 inhabitants. “It is 45 times the alert threshold which is 50 positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants. It increased again this Thursday since we are at 2,363 positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants ”, specified this official. A spectacular progression during the four weeks since it was multiplied by four, which is equivalent to 21,000 positive cases on average recorded each day in all thirteen departments.
In Haute-Garonne, it was Wednesday of 2,757 positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants, against 1,616 in the Gers. “We are still on an extremely strong dynamic, even if there is a territorial difference sometimes linked to a difference in screening rates. We entered the Omicron wave a little later than the other metropolitan regions, we are probably the last region, so it is also likely that it will continue with us a little longer, ”says Pierre Ricordeau.
Delta, Omicron and the flu
A wave that affects the age groups quite unevenly, unlike the Delta variant. If there are 650 positive cases per 100,000 inhabitants among those over 65, this rate is 4,300 for the 20-30 age group, i.e. 86 times the alert threshold.
“The difficulty is that we find ourselves faced with a combination of several epidemics at the same time. On Covid-19, we are facing two epidemics which are gradually replacing each other with the Delta and Omicron variants. And what makes it more complex is that we are also in the midst of the flu epidemic, ”laments the director of the ARS.
With consequences for healthcare establishments. The intensive care and critical care departments are still occupied by patients affected by the Delta variant. Even if new hospitalizations in these departments are down slightly, they fell from 175 last week against 200 during the previous week in the various hospitals in the region. Their occupancy rate is now 94%, nearly half of which by Covid-19 patients.
“On conventional hospitalizations, we are more on patients affected by Omicron, and there is no decrease. We are rather on a stabilization of flows at historically high levels, with more than 750 new hospitalizations in the last seven days. With the strength of the Omicron epidemic this will certainly continue to increase, the outlook is not reassuring even if the virus causes less severe forms than the Delta variant, given the number of people infected, we should have more hospital patients », Considers Pierre Ricordeau.