Lockdown is over, sort of. It appears that many office workers have stayed at home. Manual workers don’t have that option, as reports from the Paris métro make clear.

At 9.00am Paris’s main stations were not much busier than they were last week, press reports said today. People are conscious that the virus still stalks the land, it seems, and maybe working from home has caught on for good for some of the white-collar crowd.

But some of the trains from the outskirts have been packed and at 6.00-7.00am it was more or less back to normal, according to Le Monde’s transport correspondent.

#deconfinementjour1 Même type d’ambiance à Châtelet et Gare de Lyon aux heures habituellement les plus actives. Les bataillons des employés du tertiaire sont manifestement restés chez eux. En revanche, les affluences sur le coup des 6-7h du matin ressemblent à celles d’avant https://t.co/kDkACadkuH

— Eric Béziat (@ericbeziat) May 11, 2020

That’s the time when shopworkers and other essential members of the workforce go to work. When I lived in Paris, I was struck by the change in the make-up of passengers on métro line 13. The earlier it was, the fuller the trains coming from working-class Seine-Saint-Denis and the more black or north African-origin passengers there were.

Pressure from employers to come to work is likely to increase, especially since Labour Minister Muriel Pénicaud has said that “there is no reason” for the government to continue paying all of private-sector employees’ wages any more.

With up to 1.5 million people expected to use the Paris transport network today, 1,000 police have been drafted in to back up security staff.

But the instructions were not sent out until Saturday evening, so there is a certain amount of disorganisation.

In fact, officials will not have all the powers the government planned.

That’s because the country’s top court, the Conseil constitutionnel, has not ruled yet that the law extending the state of emergency is legal in all its aspects, parliament having spent too long debating it and failed to pass it on time.

So the government had to rush through a decree overnight to enforce wearing masks on public transport and limiting journeys to 100km from your home. But an employer’s certificate to testify that you have the right to travel during rush hour was left out, so you can’t be fined for not having one at the moment.

Some pupils will go back to some schools today.

The return affects the youngest kids and priority will be given to the children of parents who have to go to work.

Paris has estimated that only 15% of pupils will be back in the classrooms and some mayors, including Champigny’s Christian Fautré, have refused to authorise reopening.

Two new clusters of the virus have appeared in the provinces, both in region that are at present classed green for low contamination.

Twenty members of staff at a school near Poitiers have been placed in quarantine, with four of them testing positive. They came into contact with the virus when they attended a meeting to prepare reopening.

Nine people tested positive in a village in Dordogne after a funeral.

The undertakers insist that the obligatory precautions, which include only close family attending, were observed at the ceremony. But at some point they weren’t, since 43 more test results, all negative, were announced on Sunday. People reportedly came from Switzerland and Portugal, the latter being the deceased’s country of origin.

It’s Mum’s shower day today. She doesn’t like it, having developed a certain hydrophobia in her old age.

In pre-virus days we paid a carer to accompany her ablutions. The arrangement was for the sake of my delicate sensibilities, she was unhappy with being helped by a stranger.

Last year, in the brilliant film Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, I watched a dutiful Chinese son wash his ageing Chinese mother’s back and thought “At least I don’t have to do that!”.

Now I’m doing it, having stopped all visitors to the house when it was clear the epidemic was serious. I suppose you get used to it.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,380, 70 in the past 24 hours. 22,569 people are in hospital, down 45, with 2,776 in intensive care, down 36. 56,217 patients have been discharged from hospital.