I know this feeling, that your dancing on the edge of disaster, that there’s danger outside, that you’re living through a moment of history, but not a good one.
It’s the feeling we had driving through Kabul to beat the curfew in 2001. It’s the feeling we had when we pulled into Baghdad and saw bullet casings lying in the streets and supermarkets being looted in 2003.
You feel both threatened and thrilled. The adrenaline is always ready to surge. That’s why many people seem to be drinking a lot – it’s not just that you’re locked in with the bottles, it’s also that the constraints of avoiding the danger authorise you to cast aside some other restraints.
Prince Charles, Boris Johnson have the virus … Jair Bolsanaro may have despite his denials. In France former right-wing minister Patrick Devedjian has died from it.
Nothing for left-wingers to crow about. Let’s leave the spite to the right.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe says the worst is yet to come.
“The first fortnight of April will be even more difficult than the fortnight that has just passed,” he said at a press conference yesterday.
Army helicopters are flying seriously ill patients from the worst-hit areas to regions with free hospital beds. Two people have been transferred across the German border from Metz to a hospital in Essen.
In Ile de France 1,300 of the 1,500 intensive care places are already taken. There were 5,000 places nationally at the start of the outbreak and the government hopes to raise that to 14,000.
We won’t know what effect the lockdown has had until the end of next week, according to Dr Arnaud Fontanet, who also spoke at the press conference.
That’s because some people being diagnosed as ill today may have caught the virus before lockdown started, according to Health Minister Olivier Véran. The symptoms can take even longer than 14 days to appear, he said.
They are still working out how to handle the post-lockdown period.
A smell of the country wafted over Paris yesterday. You could smell it in Champigny, too.
It was the bucolic odour of ammonium nitrate, spread on the fields, and detectable because other forms of pollution are greatly reduced. A possible reason for the tickles in our throats many of us were feeling.
In the absence of traffic, a group of ducks was filmed waddling past the Comédie Française yesterday.
The Covid-19 recorded death toll in France is 2,314, up 319 on Friday. There are 17,620 people in hospital with the virus, 4,273 in intensive care, a rise of 486 in 24 hours. Since 1 March 6,624 people have been given a clean bill of health and discharged from hospital.
