French doctors have condemned the government’s coronavirus strategy after facing a shortage of COVID-19 tests amid a new rise in infections.
The reason for the shortage is that many testing labs are closed for the summer and the staff is on vacation. The government has said it can test up to 700,000 people a week, and hit a record high of 581,000 tests over the past week.
However, the number of infections is growing twice as fast as the growth in test rates, according to official data. Scheduling a test appointment, as well as getting results, can take a week or more.
Experts have criticised France’s “strategy that even the government’s own virus advisory panel this week called disorganized and ‘insufficient’”.
“There are just not enough people”, emergency services doctor Christophe Prudhomme said, and urged regional health agencies “to organize testing so that it’s not the citizen who has to take his phone and try to call seven or eight labs in order to get an appointment that will take place only next week”.
“The virus didn’t disappear at all. The contamination is continuing, and amplifying in some regions. We have to adapt the testing strategy to this evolution”, said Francois Blanchecotte, president of the Union of Medical Biologists.
France has already lost more than 30,000 lives to the pandemic.
