Our neighbour, Marianne, is touched by a gesture of her friend Michelle, who has recovered from the virus. Michelle is making Marianne face masks.

Coffee filters sewn into tissue are the best way to improvise, she says, but be sure to use a new one every time you go out. I have no idea how effective this is.

As the population manages as best it can, frontline workers are facing the epidemic without an adequate supply of masks, hand cleanser and tests.

Several health-workers’ unions have lodged legal complaints, accusing government leaders of involuntary homicide and failure to take the necessary measures to combat a disaster, among other equally serious charges.

With five doctors already dead, a doctors’ union has appealed to the country’s highest court, the Conseil d’état, to order the government to provide surgical masks to the population and FFP2 masks to medical professionals urgently.

A business group estimates that 100 million need to be made every month for health workers alone. France could be producing 238,000 a day, according to Guillaume Gibault, the boss of a luxury underpants manufacturer who has brought together 90 companies that are ready to provide them. 

But a common design needs to be agreed, he told Le Monde.

Masks will probably also be imported from China.

There are encouraging stories of perfumiers converting to hand cleanser production, too.

But this should not be voluntary. The invisible hand of the market is not effective against the invisible hand of a worldwide epidemic.

When I lived in Coventry in the 1980s, a veteran socialist and engineering workers’ union activist had a favourite defence of economic planning. When World War II broke out, he pointed out, the cities’ engineering factories were converted to armaments production overnight by government order.

There was a downside – the concentration of war industry in the city drew the attention of the Luftwaffe, who bombed again and again, meaning that the city centre and much of the rest of the city is a sea of post-war concrete.

But the necessary weapons were produced. Now we need to produce the necessary medical supplies, not for use against fellow human beings but against a sometimes deadly virus.

A la guerre comme à la guerre! If we want to test, test, test, governments must requisition, requisition, requisition.  

Another memory from the UK comes to mind.

When I was a political activist living in Nottingham – yes, I got about a bit – I was asked to visit the village of Eyam, in the Peak District. The attraction of Eyam was that it was sufficiently remote to hold a meeting without too many people knowing about it and had the facilities to do so.

Eyam has a history of isolation. In the 17^th century the plague broke out there, due to infected material sent from plague-hit London, and the villagers voluntarily quarantined themselves.

“There is still on the outskirts of the village a location called the Boundary stone, where traditionally, money was placed in small holes for the provisions which those from the local area brought for the villagers,” the village’s website tells us today. “As a result of this action, the disease did not spread but almost a third of the villagers died.”

They remained in quarantine for 14 months. It was a beautiful sunny day like today when I visited Eyam. I don’t remember much from the trip but I was struck by how pretty the village was and disappointed that the meeting did not in the end take place there.