Our neighbour Marianne was cutting forsythia at her end of the courtyard when I put my head outside the door yesterday. She said it was to prevent it blocking another neighbour’s windows. I begged her not to throw the branches away, so there is a pile of gold on the top of the steps in front of her house.
“I’ve lost a friend,” she told me. “An anarchist comrade. One of the ones I made video about.” Marianne is an anarchist, though not a politically active one, and she runs Video-sur-Marne, which collects short films about the area by her and other people.
“He was only 30 and had been healthy,” she said. “It looks like they didn’t take the symptoms seriously enough. He started having difficulty breathing and within four hours he was dead.”
Marianne has been discussing with a friend whether the epidemic will change people’s attitudes for the good.
She doesn’t think so. Neither does her friend. And they find the evening applause sessions for health workers “indecent”.
Raphaël, the man from the council who phones every day to check that Mum is alright, is more optimistic. The crisis is a lesson in solidarity, he said when we chatted yesterday.
He has to phone about 10 elderly people every day, except weekends. Staying inside is getting him down a bit, he says – he appears to be a fairly sporty type. “But I get out to deliver groceries to some of the old folk who can’t get outside themselves.”
To the chemist, to pick up Mum’s prescription. They are all wearing face masks and gloves and work behind plexiglass screens.
I asked the young woman who served me how she found wearing a mask on all day.
“It’s not great,” she said. “There’s a mark on our faces when we get home and our eyes are sore and red.”
The weekend’s improvement has not lasted, Le Monde reports. The number of deaths in the last 24 hours rose again to 605, the highest yet.
The number of hospitalisations and admissions to intensive care has also risen. But they are not as high as they were on Friday, or throughout last week when they were over 1,000 per day.
France’s Covid-19 death rate now officially stands at 8,911. 29,722 people have been hospitalised, 7,072 are in intensive care. There are 74,390 confirmed cases (unquestionably an underestimate) and 17,250 people have been discharged from hospital.
