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In their letter to the editor, Foucrier et al. This is a quite optimistic view considering the time course of daily ICU admissions and of ICU beds availability they report. In addition, no direct relationship has been established between both indicators by these authors.
Furthermore, the decrease of the latter is slower than the increase of the earlier. This gap can be related to at least three factors including underestimating the kinetics of spread of the pandemic, delay in ICU beds increase and lack of anticipation of increasing medicine beds for patients who do not require ICU admission. At the time of lockdown and suppression of non-urgent surgery in France, on the 17 th of March , pandemic kinetics was known from other countries, even though the data could be biased [2].
It does not take into account the wide individual variations conditioning the effective length of stay in ICU. Unfortunately, the latter was not organised and the earlier was only gradual contributing to the time gap illustrated by Foucrier et al. A better coordination between hospitals and clinics could have prevented from interregional transfers of critical patients.
In addition, although not documented, early opening of post-ICU beds would have increased the availability of ICU beds by increasing patient turnover as soon as life threatening conditions are under control. In this specific context, private clinics that cancelled scheduled surgery were asked to contribute to such a strategy in the late phase of the pandemic increase, as related by one of them [3].
