The Covid-19 pandemic was a highly disruptive event for the health sector in France, as it was in other countries. The purpose of this paper is to see how health establishments coped with this sudden and unexpected event. The traditional way of handling situations of crisis proved to be totally ill-adapted and ineffective to take up the challenges of the pandemic. Therefore, health establishments had to find other unconventional ways to respond to the various threats posed by the occurrence and the spread of the virus.