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These figures were released on October 28 by an official agency linked to the French Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and brought to the public’s attention by Martin Blachier, a data analyst and public health specialist.
PARIS, France (LifeSiteNews) – In 2020, the year COVID-19 made its appearance and triggered hitherto unseen curbs on public liberties in most parts of the world, only 2 percent of patient hospitalizations in France were attributable to the disease. And notwithstanding the hype about intolerable pressure on the French hospital system, only 5 percent of patients in critical care were COVID patients (and 11 percent of patients on life support).
These figures were released on October 28 by an official agency linked to the French Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, the ATIH (Technical Agency for Information on Hospitalization), and were brought to the public’s attention by Martin Blachier, a data analyst and public health specialist with medical training.
Blachier told a journalist of La chaîne parlementaire (LCP), the public television station of the French parliament, that the ATIH “manages all hospital data systems and knows about all hospitalizations that take place throughout the French territory as well as the reason for them.”
“When you read this report, in the very first lines you find that during the year 2020 COVID patients represented 5 percent of all patients cared for in the intensive care units. You read on and learn that COVID patients represented 2 percent of all inpatients in the year 2020. When you see this ATIH report, you are a little surprised, you look up, and you say, ‘We are talking about this year 2020 where there were 2 lockdowns.’ It cost France 200 billion euro, and we know that 35 percent of young people have acknowledged that they had suicidal ideations because of these lockdowns, and I’m not even talking about learning delays and school phobias that haven’t even been quantified by formal studies,” he said.
Over the last 18 months – and over 500 media appearances – Martin Blachier has wavered between alarmist predictions and reality checks. In recent weeks, he has slammed lockdown policies and, while promoting “vaccination” for the elderly, has also made very clear that he would never agree to force the COVID jabs on his own children.
On the LCP show, Blachier went on to comment on the official report, noting that “in reality, it is a little more complex.”
“It is true that these COVID hospitalizations are a little longer than standard hospitalizations, but if you take this factor into account, on the total number of hospitalization days, fewer than one [day] out of five [days] was related to COVID in the year 2020. And yes, you had more saturation during the few weeks of the peak of the waves, but in any case, over the whole year, these two percent of hospitalizations are very, very, very far away from the image we have of them: that is to say, that during the whole year 2020, hospital wards were full to the brim with COVID patients, and that the other patients could no longer go to hospital,” he said.
Many critics of public COVID policies pounced on the numbers, noting that the scare tactics used by the government to impose restrictions, lockdowns, and now forced vaccination for health and care workers as well as the sanitary pass required of all citizens aged 12 and over are based on realities that are not nearly as concerning as they were made out to be.
Mainstream media “fact-checked” the data and, although they could not deny the statistics published by a government agency, insisted that things had indeed been very bad during the peaks of the two COVID epidemics registered in France in the spring of 2020 and then in October and November, with up to 35,000 COVID patients in hospital simultaneously for a few weeks in April and November.
They also stressed that COVID patients stayed up to 18 days on average in life support units, with 11 percent of patients representing 19 percent of hospitalization days.
