In late February, as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to hit, French President Emmanuel Macron faced a critical decision. Like most countries, ...
PARIS: In late February, as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to hit, French President Emmanuel Macron faced a critical decision. Like most countries, France did not have enough protective face masks.
The experience in France underscores how, confronted with the deadly new virus and sparse resources with which to tackle it, even governments that have acted forcefully can face limits and unintended consequences to their interventions.Thirty minutes' drive from the centre of Paris, the state-owned Emile Gerard retirement home had placed orders with its usual suppliers for 1,700 protective masks in late February and early March for the 240-bed facility, said interim manager Elsa Nicoise.
The government never physically requisitioned stocks of masks, but producers and suppliers who wanted to avoid violating the decree stopped shipping them to customers. Most didn't resume regular deliveries until late March.Reuters found no evidence of a direct link between the requisition policy and the deaths of any particular nursing home residents. People in the French nursing home sector say their protective equipment supplies are now adequate.
The ministry said, however, stocks of masks had initially been frozen - it did not say who by - and that nursing homes at the start of the crisis were worried about supplies. The country was supposed to hold one billion surgical masks and 600 million filtering facepiece or FFP2 masks – also known as N95 masks, a tight-fitting design to protect the wearer from infection. But it had zero FFP2 masks and the stock of surgical masks was down to 117 million, Health Minister Olivier Veran told reporters on Mar 21.
With the fresh supplies blocked, the Emile Gerard home was left with a stock of 800 surgical masks and 765 FFP2 masks, said Nicoise. A local school donated another 700 masks. It was not enough. At the rate that the home was using masks now, she said, the FFP2 masks would last for several weeks, but the surgical masks would only last a few days.
Mask supplier Le Réseau Cocci said there were delivery disruptions to all the 160 nursing and retirement homes and three hospitals that it supplies."We had a huge number of calls from hospitals and we weren't able to give them answers," said its boss, Ronald Monfrini.
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