PARIS (Reuters) – The French government on Wednesday criticized its POLICY of detecting COVID-19 loose for everyone, as queues escaped from some control centers in Paris and at sites across the country amid an outbreak of infections.
One leading federation of laboratories said an abrupt July 25 decree to make testing free-of-charge and without prescription piled pressure on at a time many staff go on holiday. Political opponents lampooned a policy 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 proliferation of new coronavirus groups.
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.
Lately, France is testing about 576,000 more people a week, Reuters was told by a spokesman for the Ministry of Fitness on Wednesday, up from 200,000 when President Emmanuel Macron began to ease one of Europe’s strictest locks.
The strategy is working, health minister Olivier Veran said over the weekend. “The virus is no longer tracking 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 laboratories to invest in the manpower and operational changes needed to conduct testing, the government had considered requisitioning some of them, one government official said.
Reporting through Tangi Salaun; Additional reports through Emilie Delwarde; Editing through Richard Lough and Giles Elgood
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