PARIS (Reuters) – The French government was under fire on Wednesday over its free-for-all COVID-19 testing policy as queues snaked out of some testing centres in Paris and at sites across the country amid a flare-up in infections.
A federation of leading laboratories said an abrupt july 25 decree caused testing to loosen and unbutton many workers at a time when many staff members go on vacation. Political parties at war have ridiculed a politics in disarray.
“To prove someone is useless. You have to be the target,” epidemiologist Didier Pittet, who heads a government-appointed working group to oversee COVID-19’s remedy, told Europe 1 radio station.
France, like many of its European neighbours, is witnessing a mushrooming of new coronavirus clusters.
The number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care increased Tuesday by the time, day by day, reversing a 16-week downward trend. The disease has killed more than 30,000 people in France.
France is now testing some 576,000 people per week, an Health Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday, compared with 200,000 when President Emmanuel Macron began easing one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns.
It’s working, health minister Olivier Veran said over the weekend. “The virus is no longer harassing us, we are tracking it,” he told Le Parisien.
The ministry spokesman stated that the “localized problems” insisted that France had selected the right strategy.
But Lionel Barrand, who heads the Federation of the National Union of Young Biologists, said the open check strategy as looking for a needle in a haystack and feeding the labs.
“The government threw sand on our wheels. He sent many other people to the labs without warning,” Barrand told Reuters.
Frustrated by the reluctance of some labs to invest in the workforce and operational adjustments needed to conduct the tests, the government required some of them, a government official said.
Reporting by Tangi Salaun; Additional reporting by Emilie Delwarde; Editing by Richard Lough and Giles Elgood
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