PARIS (Reuters) – The French government on Wednesday criticized its COVID-19 detection policy on the loose for everyone, as the queues escaped from some control centers in Paris and at locations across the country amid an outbreak of infections.
A federation of leading labs said an abrupt July 25 decree that caused testing to be loose and evict many workers at a time when many staff members were going on vacation. Political parties at war have ridiculed a politics in disarray.
“To prove someone is useless. You have to be a target,” epidemiologist Didier Pittet, who heads a government-appointed working group to oversee the COVID-19 remedy, told Europe 1.
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 on Tuesday for the time in a row, reversing a 16-week downward trend. The disease has killed more than 30,000 people in France.
France is recently testing another 576,000 people a week, a spokesman for the Ministry of Fitness told Reuters on Wednesday, up from 200,000 when President Emmanuel Macron began to flex one of Europe’s strictest blockades.
It’s working, health minister Olivier Veran said over the weekend. “The virus no longer haunts us, we are following it,” he told Le Parisien.
The ministry spokesman said 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 verification strategy is like finding a needle in a haystack and feeding the labs.
“The government has thrown 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 workforce and operational adjustments needed to conduct the tests, the government required some of them, a government official said.
(Information through Tangi Salaun; Additional information through Emilie Delwarde; Edited through Richard Lough and Giles Elgood)
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