Health Minister Olivier Véran has given us all a good talking to. There could be a new lockdown if the virus starts to spread again, he warns.
“We haven’t finished with the virus,” Véran said today. “If we don’t collectively observe social distancing and protective measures, the virus will take off again.”
Mr Déconfinement, Jean Castex, has a plan ready.
If the number of cases reported daily returns to twice the rate when lockdown ended on Monday, we could be confined to our homes again, although the measure might be restricted to affected areas rather than national.
He is suspending judgement on whether we’re out of the epidemical woods until 2 June, he says.
The country’s top court, the Conseil constitutionnel, has blocked two measures in the renewed state of emergency.
Social workers will not have access to information gathered to trace possible Covid-19 cases, it ruled, but it accepted that tracing itself “pursues the constitutional value of protection of health”.
It also decided that people arriving in France can only be forced into quarantine on the orders of a judge. Dodgy one, that.
I have mixed feelings about the Conseil constitutionnel.
Its nine members are picked by the president and the chairs of both chambers of parliament. You don’t get more establishment than that. Even worse, former presidents also have the right to sit on it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, currently accused of groping a German journalist, is a member, while Nicolas Sarkozy renounced his seat in 2013 and François Hollande has never exercised the right.
I must be mellowing as my age advances because I am partly persuaded by the bourgeois democratic argument in favour of checks and balances. And the council has taken some decisions that have protected individual liberties.
But in 2012 it achieved the astonishing feat of finding that the Socialist government’s wealth tax was contrary to the Republic’s principle of equality. There’s little doubt that it would take up the cudgels in favour of the rich and powerful in the event of a government taking on the power of capital.
Transport staff, sporting masks and visors, are posted outside Champigny station, checking that people abide by the rule that they must wear masks. Most of the entrances are closed and outside of rush hours there appear to be about half the usual number of trains.
Our neighbour Marianne and her partner, Christian, celebrated their second day of relative freedom with a day out in Paris – a short day since only people going to work or on some other vital business such as a court case can use the network between 6.30 and 9.30am and 4.00 and 7.00pm.
She took her mask and the bottle of alcoholic gel that she managed to find at a local pharmacy. It was great, she reports.
Having checked that I still have a car – it’s parked in a private carpark round the corner which I haven’t visited for two months – and that it still works, hasn’t been crushed by a tree in the storm or suffered any other dreadful fate, I shall not be risking public transport for a while yet.
France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 26,991, up 348 yesterday. 21,595 people are in hospital, down 689 in 24 hours, with 2,542 in intensive care, down 170. 57,785 patients have been discharged from hospital, 1,061 yesterday.
