Philippe had the virus. He was exposed to it because he does an indispensable job, even if that job is poorly paid and commands little respect.
Philippe is a dustman, leaving home during the night and returning in the early afternoon, all for a fraction of the salary that many less essential workers pocket. While the white-collar workers who live in our courtyard work from home, while the man in an apparently inessential branch of the building trade appears to be laid off, Philippe kept going to work. And so he caught the virus.
He’s a friendly man with a southern French accent – he came to the Paris area from the south-west. He lives in a ground-floor flat more or less opposite our house.
Philippe often opens the window – bare-chested and brown between the months of April and September – to chat with the neighbours. He hadn’t done that for a few days, so when he appeared at the window yesterday afternoon I asked if he had been ill.
He had, for about 10 days, he said. The experience had not been pleasant, he Added, but he’s recovering now.
This is not the first time his job has exposed him to illness. He once caught mange off a mattress, apparently.
Inequality is evident not just in exposure to the virus but also in our experience of confinement.
Philippe is stuck in his poky, dark flat. My mum and I are able to sit out in front of our house and three lucky neighbours actually have gardens. And then there are the inhabitants of the 16e arrondissement of Paris who headed to their holiday homes before lockdown was announced.
The town council asked Raphaël, the man who phones every day to check on Mum’s health, to go out and see how well the lockdown was being observed in the area he lives in, Bois l’Abbé.
Despite its pretty name, Bois l’Abbé is a working-class area with a lot of social housing, much of it tower blocks.
A lot of people had fled their less-than-luxury apartments to enjoy the sunshine, Raphaël reported. “People can’t take it any more,” he said.
I lived in a 10th-floor council flat in Coventry in the 1980s and I can testify that it can drive you a bit nuts even when you’re not locked in to avoid an epidemic. Not everyone seems to feel the same way, but I found the lack of street-level social interaction – the sort of interchange you don’t even notice – isolating and depressing.
That’s what the inhabitants of Bois l’Abbé are trying to escape, even if they are perhaps unwise to do so at the moment.
“Those who live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lockdown a lot tougher,” as Emily Maitlis said on the BBC yesterday. “Those who work in manual jobs will be unable to work from home.”
And, as Raphaël says, the government has to take that into account when deciding the conditions for extending lockdown and how to wind it down when the time comes.
The government is putting more police on the roads out of town this weekend to stop city-dwellers who haven’t got the message trolling off on an Easter break.
There is hope we will soon reach a plateau, France’s top health official, Jérôme Salomon, says. “But it’s a very high plateau”.
More than 12,000 deaths from the virus have now been recorded. The deaths in care homes that were not accounted for yesterday have been added to today’s total.
But for the first time more people were discharged from intensive care than were admitted, slightly easing the pressure on the overstretched health service.
There were 41% more deaths in the week 30 March-5 April than usual, although not all those deaths were due to the virus.
France’s official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 12,210. 30,767 people have been hospitalised, up 392 in 24 hours, but the number in intensive care is down 82 to 7,066. There are 86,334 officially recorded cases but that is clearly an underestimate due to the lack of testing. 23,206 people have been discharged from hospital, up 1,952.
