Coronavirus diary day 47 – Covid-19 boosts economy … with the truth

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At home, prepare the revolution, Poster by Atélier Youpi

The French government has opened an anti-fake news page on its website. Meanwhile, the health minister has assured us that more tests would not have reduced the number of Covid-19 cases, the official map of infection levels has had to be revised, and leaked documents show there will not be enough masks until June.

“The Coronavirus crisis encourages the spread of #fakenews,” the government’s indefatigable spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye declared in a tweet on Thursday.

So the government’s website now has a page linking to “viable and verifiable sources”. At least the sites are not run by the government. They are the fact-checkers of established media, such as Le Monde and Libération.

But these ingrates have not all been delighted by the official endorsement, which itself could lead the disaffected to see them as firmly ensconced in the establishment.

On top of which, some well-known media outlets, for example right-wing Le Figaro, left-wing Médiapart and the regional press, don’t figure on the good-guys list.

With immaculate timing, Health Minister Olivier Véran on the same day told LCI television, “A test doesn’t cure, it doesn’t change the treatment or the diagnosis … If we had tested absolutely everybody we would have more or less the same number of people ill.”

In South Korea, which is next door to China and has almost as big a population as France, there have been 10,780 confirmed Covid-19 cases, compared to France’s 130,185, (both figures are undoubtedly underestimates even if Véran implied in the same interview that the French statistics were accurate). South Korea’s death toll is 250, compared to France’s 24,594.

South Korea’s success in fighting the virus is universally attributed to a strict policy of testing, tracing and treating.

After publishing a map with three départements with practically no Covid-19 cases marked as heavily infected, the national health authority has been forced to issue a new one, having admitted that the original statistics were based on irrelevant information.

And Le Monde reveals that interior ministry internal documents point out that the masks that we are all supposed to wear in public once lockdown is lifted are unevenly distributed across the country, leading to the risk “that some French people will have too many and others won’t be able to find any”.

Not to worry though, the number of masks has “considerably risen in the last few weeks” and the situation should be sorted out by June, when we initially hoped all this would be over.

Let’s take a look back at our lockdown May Day.

Here’s a piper playing the Internationale on a Paris street.

The words to the Internationale were written by Eugène Pottier, who was elected to the Paris Commune and wrote them while in hiding from the repression that crushed it.

He fled to the USA and returned to France when an amnesty was declared in 1880.

The music was composed by Pierre de Geyter, a Belgian who lived in the northern French town of Lille, until he was obliged to leave because the bosses blacklisted him as a dangerous revolutionary.

And here and at the top of this post are some graphics for couch-stranded rebels, produced by the Atélier Youpi, which in normal times operates out of Saint Denis, the working-class town on the northern outskirts of Paris.

Stay/Resist at home Altélier Youpi

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,594, up 218 in the last 24 hours. 25,887 people are in hospital, down 396, with 3,878 in intensive care, down 141. 50,212 people have been discharged from hospital, 736 of them yesterday.

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