Monthly Archives: May 2020

Coronavirus diary day 62 – Yellow Vests are back (a bit) as new virus clusters spotted

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The Gilets Jaunes are back. A few of them, anyway. And 25 clusters of Covid-19 cases have been identified in France since lockdown was lifted, although the situation does still seem to be improving.

A few hundred Yellow Vests appeared on the streets of several French cities on Saturday, apparently just to remind the government that they’re still there.

The biggest assembly, which wasn’t that big, seems to have been down south, in Montpellier. Others were in the Breton capital, Nantes, which can always be relied on for a protest whenever the possibility arises, Lyon, Toulouse, and Saint-Nazaire.

With demonstrations banned, some gathered in groups of 10, the legal limit of an assembly under the anti-Covid state of emergency. That didn’t stop police being considerably tougher on them than US cops have been on the armed lockdown-defiers there.

There were a number of arrests and police used their truncheons against the crowd in Montpellier, one woman being injured in the head.

In Bordeaux and Toulouse (see below), shopkeepers took the demonstrators to task for defying the lockdown and obstructing trade in these straitened times.

Business was also on Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s mind, as he reminded the public of the demo ban.

“In this period when we must help economic recovery and a form of liberty for our fellow citizens,” he said. “People who want to obstruct commercial activity have to understand that this is not the moment to express oneself in this way.”

Twenty-five new clusters of the virus have been identified in France since the end of lockdown, Health Minister Olivier Véran has told the Journal du Dimanche.

New cases were to be expected, he said, and the only part of France where there has been a resurgence so far is in Mayotte, an overseas territory in the Indian Ocean. (Yes, it’s part of France, as are French Guiana in South America, New Caledonia and French Polynesia in the Pacific, and several other Dom-Toms, as they’re called.)

Following Macron’s mea culpa in a hospital this week, Véran promised a consultation and review of the government’s health policy and pay rises for healthworkers, on top of the bonuses that have already been decided on.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,625, 96 in the last 24 hours. 19,432 people are in hospital, down 429, with 2,132 in intensive care, down 71. 61,066 people have been discharged from hospital, down 618 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 61 – Lockdown drove down French death rate, and not just for Covid-19

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Lockdown seems to have worked. The number of deaths per day has declined since a high point of 600 a day of the beginning of April.

Graph by Insee

In fact, numbers crunched by the official statistics institute, Insee, show we have now reached a lower death rate for all causes than in 2018 and 2019, as this fascinating thread from British journalist John Lichfield shows:

At least two causes of death have declined because of lockdown – traffic accidents, down 55% in April to 103, and air pollution, largely due to reduction in road and air traffic, since highly toxic pollution by chemical fertilisers and, earlier in the year, wood-burning stoves, has continued.

There are undoubtedly other factors that should be taken into account and the long-term effects of confinement, for example on mental health and poverty, have yet to become clear.

The Insee figures, unlike the current government figures, include an estimate of deaths at home.

The number of admissions to hospital and patients in intensive care, a better indication of the number of infections today, continues to fall.

Five days after the end of lockdown, there has been no resurgence of the virus. But the weekend will be a new test, in particular of how people observe social distancing in public places.

Having championed the wearing of masks, I think I have detected a downside. Some people wearing them seem to think they are sufficiently protected to be able to dispense with social distancing.

Several French mayors have declared face-masks compulsory in all public spaces.

An order to wear maskes between 8.00am and 8.00pm in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret

The rulings are likely to be overturned. The Conseil d’Etat has already ruled that the mayors are exceeding their powers in this respect.

On the phone to my brother Peter yesterday, I found he was joining other parents in indulging in the French habit of bending the rules by allowing his daughter, Rita, to play on the grass in the courtyard of the Paris block of flats where they live.

That lawn-consciousness reminded us of the age of the park police – uniformed functionaries who used to blow a whistle and gesticulate at you if you sat on the grass in public spaces. They seem to have been abolished a few years ago. These days Parisians can park their elegant arses in green spaces without fear of reprimand or fines.

Why did they exist?

Is it because France is partly a Mediterranean country and so grass needs protection in the drier parts of the country?

Is it because of the concept of the hypercivilised jardin à la française, a delicate creation for aristocrats to admire without being troubled by plebs littering the lawns?

Or is it a legacy of Bonapartism-Gaullism, a state that enrols part of the population in policing their fellow citizens, like the legendarily nosy Paris concierges who were widely believed to enjoy close relations with the police?

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,529, up 104 in the last 24 hours. 60,448 people have been discharged from hospital, 843 yesterday. The number of patients in intensive care fell by 96. The government’s website has not updated the other figures I usually give.

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Coronavirus diary day 60 – Hydroxychloroquine, turns out it doesn’t seem to work

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Hydroxychloroquine isn’t a miracle cure, then. It appears that Professor Didier Raoult is a bit of a bullshitter and President Donald Trump is a bit of a mug. Who’d have thought it?

The Raoult cult – a Marseille man has had his leg tattooed with the professor’s image

“Hydroxychloroquine has received worldwide attention as a potential treatment for covid-19 because of positive results from small studies,” the abstract of a French study published in the British Medical Journal today says. “However, the results of this study do not support its use in patients admitted to hospital with covid-19 who require oxygen.”

It bases its findings on 84 patients who received the treatment Raoult has so loudly advocated and 89 who did not.

There was virtually no difference between the results for the two groups, apart from the fact that eight patients in the treatment group had to stop taking the drug because of heart problems.

A Chinese study of 150 patients with mild or moderate symptoms also found the treatment made no significant difference, apart from the fact that 30% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine got the shits or some other side-effects, compared to 9% in the other group.

Raoult, who prefers to air his theories in online videos rather than peer-reviewed papers, has polarised opinion since he made his claim that the anti-malaria drug, when combined with azithromycin, could cure the disease.

Where you stand depends on how you feel about an energetic self-publicist who slags off his colleagues and cultivates the friendship of hard-right politicians, all qualities that don’t automatically make you a bad scientist, I suppose. Some people – conspiracy theorists, Marseille patriots – seem to like that sort of thing.

In an interview with the New York Times, Raoult criticised his profession  for being riven with hubris. Pot, kettle, black …

I went to Joinville-le-Pont yesterday. It’s the furthest I have been since mid-March. What an adventure!

I haven’t been around the world, as John Littlejohn claims to have done in his stunning rendition of this Jimmy Rogers number, but I have visited at least 35 countries, some on the other side of the planet.

 Now a drive of four kilometres to pick up some groceries seems unspeakably daring.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,425, with a worrying rise to 351 yesterday. The other figures are more encouraging – 20,463 people are in hospital, down 608, with 2,299 in intensive care, down 129. And 59,605 people have been discharged from hospital, 932 in the pat 24 hours.

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Coronavirus diary day 59 – You pays your money, you gets your vaccine

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It ain’t over yet! Keep washing your hands! (And social distancing, which they’re not doing in this old ad for laundry soap)

First it was our masks, now it’s our medicines! The US will be served first if Sanofi develops a vaccine against Covid-19 because the Americans have put more money into the research, the French-based drug company’s boss said yesterday.

Last month US diplomats in China bought shipments of masks ordered by France, Germany and other countries as they stood on the airport runway.

Now Paul Hudson, a peripatetic British marketing expert who was appointed last year, has said Washington will be able to place the biggest advance orders of any vaccine that is developed because the Barda research and development body has “shared in the risk” in trying to develop it.

If Europeans want to move higher up the pecking order, the EU must match American investment, he said.

The French opposition Socialist Party shot out a communiqué dubbing the announcement scandalous.

Pointing out that France has contributed a fair bit to Sanofi’s worldwide success, the party says that our health should not be subject to the whims of the market, adding “no French company should gamble with our own health security without facing the threat of nationalisation”.

“It’s obvious that our health must be excluded from the rules of the market,” Socialist former minister and presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, told France Inter radio.

All of which begs the question of why they left pharmaceutical companies in private hands while they were in power.

Junior government minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher joined in the condemnation, although she kept it in the conditional.

“For us it would be inacceptable if any country had privileged access on a pretext that would be a monetary pretext,” she told Sud-radio.

In the evening Sanofi said that the US would have priority for vaccine produced on its territory and the rest of its production would go to “Europe, France and the rest of the world”. They didn’t say where they plan to produce how much of the product, which, for the moment, remains strictly hypothetical anyway.

There will be a second wave in France unless strict control of people’s behaviour is maintained, a study led by the Institut Pasteur warns.

The boffins who estimated that 5.7% of France’s population had been infected, thus making herd immunity an idle fantasy for months to come, now believe that was an overestimate. They have revised the figure to 4.4%, ie 2.8 million people.

In Ile de France, the hardest-hit region, 9.9% of the population has been infected, they believe.

Lockdown has been effective, the study concludes, but that means that very few people have assembled the necessary antibodies.

They find that 3.6% of infected people are hospitalised and 0.7% die, ranging from 0.0001% of under-20s to 10.1% of over-80s.  

“Effective measures of control designed to limit the risk of transmission must be maintained after 11 May [when lockdown ended] to avoid a resurgence of the epidemic,” they warn.

Meanwhile, people are rushing to the shops to buy clothes and get haircuts.

They can also go to the beach in some areas, although they mustn’t sunbathe or picnic, just take exercise.

So what has the government got against parks?

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants them to be reopened to the public for the sake of their health.

“You can take the métro but you can’t go into a park,” she points out.

But the capital is in a red zone, so letting the populace gambol in those green spaces would be “inopportune, given the vivacity of the virus’s circulation in Ile de France,” government spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye says.

As a compromise, Hidalgo suggests limiting the number of people who can enter at any one time.

Cédric Herrou, the farmer who helped migrants cross the border from Italy, has been acquitted by an appeal court in Lyon.

NGOs say the decision means that solidarity is not a crime.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,074, 83 in the past 24 hours, which is a return to the lower figures reported at the end of last week. 21,071 people are in hospital, down 524, and 2,428 are in intensive care, down 114. 58,673 patients have been discharged from hospital, 888 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 58 – Lockdown could return if we don’t behave

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RATP staff outside Champigny station yesterday Photo: Tony Cross

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.

In rush hour you must have an employer’s certificate or a declaration of vital business to ride the rails

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.

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Coronavirus diary day 57 – France’s lockdown ends smoothly – apart from some Parisians behaving badly

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The banks of the River Marne yesterday Photo: Tony Cross

Officials say that the end of lockdown went smoothly. But some Parisians threw caution to the winds. And a young man appeared in court in western France after being caught flouting confinement rules 17 times.

France is a country of rules and regulations. But it’s also a country where the rules are habitually bent.

It’s the “normalement” factor.

“Do you have a room?” you may ask a hotel. “Normalement, non,” they may reply and then find you one, which shouldn’t really be let for some obscure reason or other but can be put at your disposition exceptionellement. (I remember this example from a book review I read many years ago. I think it was of Polly Platt’s brilliantly titled French or Foe, which I confess I have never got round to actually reading.)

There was a lot of rule-bending as the end of lockdown approached, as I noted yesterday.

Now it’s over but we’re still a red, high-risk, zone here and normalement the promenades along the side of the Marne are closed by decree. But, encouraged perhaps by the fact that it’s not exactly clear how they’re defined, many of us celebrated the first day of déconfinement with a riverside stroll.

There were even a couple of fishermen. Unlike the flock of Canada geese with their goslings, who are not constrained by anti-virus concerns, people were mostly observing social distancing.

Canada geese on the Marne yesterday Photo: Tony Cross

That wasn’t the case along the Canal Saint Martin in Paris. Crowds of young, immunity-confident people gathered there in great, tightly packed numbers.

That prompted the Paris préfecture to issue a new decree, banning the consumption of alcohol along the waterway.

Meanwhile, shoppers have been queueing at the required distance, masks are widely worn and many people continue to work from home.

An 18-year-old man appeared in court in Rennes, the Breton capital, yesterday, charged with his 17th breach of lockdown rules.

Police stopped his car on Saturday night. His passengers legged it but he was detained and found to be driving without a licence or insurance.

They also found that he had already been booked 16 times for being outdoors without the certificate required if you left home.

A sentence of 35 hours of community service after his 10th breach of the rules had apparently failed to make a great impression.

I can find no report of Monday’s judgement.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,643, 263 in the past 24 hours. That’s a worrying reversal of the decline in the daily death rate, which was down to 70 yesterday, but not as high as last Monday’s 306. It can probably be partly explained by underreporting at the weekend and, of course, reflects the infection rate of about a fortnight ago. 22,284 people are in hospital, down 285 yesterday, with 2,712 in intensive care, down 64. 56,724 patients have been discharged from hospital, 507 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 56 – Social divide on show as France’s lockdown ends

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Lockdown is over, sort of. It appears that many office workers have stayed at home. Manual workers don’t have that option, as reports from the Paris métro make clear.

“Avoid rush hour,” says this poster at Champigny station. Photo: Tony Cross

At 9.00am Paris’s main stations were not much busier than they were last week, press reports said today. People are conscious that the virus still stalks the land, it seems, and maybe working from home has caught on for good for some of the white-collar crowd.

But some of the trains from the outskirts have been packed and at 6.00-7.00am it was more or less back to normal, according to Le Monde’s transport correspondent.

That’s the time when shopworkers and other essential members of the workforce go to work. When I lived in Paris, I was struck by the change in the make-up of passengers on métro line 13. The earlier it was, the fuller the trains coming from working-class Seine-Saint-Denis and the more black or north African-origin passengers there were.

Pressure from employers to come to work is likely to increase, especially since Labour Minister Muriel Pénicaud has said that “there is no reason” for the government to continue paying all of private-sector employees’ wages any more.

Masks compulsory, warns this poster at Champigny station Photo: Tony Cross

With up to 1.5 million people expected to use the Paris transport network today, 1,000 police have been drafted in to back up security staff.

But the instructions were not sent out until Saturday evening, so there is a certain amount of disorganisation.

In fact, officials will not have all the powers the government planned.

That’s because the country’s top court, the Conseil constitutionnel, has not ruled yet that the law extending the state of emergency is legal in all its aspects, parliament having spent too long debating it and failed to pass it on time.

So the government had to rush through a decree overnight to enforce wearing masks on public transport and limiting journeys to 100km from your home. But an employer’s certificate to testify that you have the right to travel during rush hour was left out, so you can’t be fined for not having one at the moment.

Some pupils will go back to some schools today.

The return affects the youngest kids and priority will be given to the children of parents who have to go to work.

Paris has estimated that only 15% of pupils will be back in the classrooms and some mayors, including Champigny’s Christian Fautré, have refused to authorise reopening.

Two new clusters of the virus have appeared in the provinces, both in region that are at present classed green for low contamination.

Twenty members of staff at a school near Poitiers have been placed in quarantine, with four of them testing positive. They came into contact with the virus when they attended a meeting to prepare reopening.

Nine people tested positive in a village in Dordogne after a funeral.

The undertakers insist that the obligatory precautions, which include only close family attending, were observed at the ceremony. But at some point they weren’t, since 43 more test results, all negative, were announced on Sunday. People reportedly came from Switzerland and Portugal, the latter being the deceased’s country of origin.

It’s Mum’s shower day today. She doesn’t like it, having developed a certain hydrophobia in her old age.

In pre-virus days we paid a carer to accompany her ablutions. The arrangement was for the sake of my delicate sensibilities, she was unhappy with being helped by a stranger.

Last year, in the brilliant film Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, I watched a dutiful Chinese son wash his ageing Chinese mother’s back and thought “At least I don’t have to do that!”.

Now I’m doing it, having stopped all visitors to the house when it was clear the epidemic was serious. I suppose you get used to it.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,380, 70 in the past 24 hours. 22,569 people are in hospital, down 45, with 2,776 in intensive care, down 36. 56,217 patients have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 55 – Storms over Paris and sex in a time of Covid-19

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What a storm! I sleep in the eaves, so I had a front row bed for nature’s sound effects last night. That’s as exciting as it gets in my bedroom and there hasn’t been all that much action in other people’s boudoirs, according to an opinion poll on the French people’s sex life during.

The rain pounded down – some of it was hail by the sound of it – stopping and starting again, thunder rolled, a lightning flash lit up the part of the room below the mezzanine below where I sleep. I thought of pagan gods fighting it out with thunderbolts and couldn’t help fantasising that the deluge would wash away the virus.

The tempest hit the Paris region, where three weeks-worth of rain in one night was reported, as well as much of the centre and the south-west, where the rainfall could be the heaviest in a century by the time it’s over.

Because there’s more to come, 18 départements are on orange alert this afternoon and tonight.

At least it will encourage people to stay at home.

How much sex have the French been having during lockdown? That’s the question some plucky pollsters have probing as déconfinement approaches.

Some 87% of single people have had no sex at all for the past 54 days, they found, a figure backed up by a slump in the sales of condoms.

And the number of couples having sex more than twice a week has gone down to 25% from a usual average of 36%.

Contrary to earlier reports there has been no porn boom: 38% of singles and 25% of couples have sought online stimulation. That’s confirmed by an investigation into Google searches by Le Monde. It found a dip in searches for smut mid-April, although searches for home-made pornography were up. There were also a lot of searches for how to find flour and bake your own bread.

Hints on perking up your sex life went down until mid-April, when they got their mojo back and soared to record heights. Among the searches: Kamasutra omelette, Kamasutra snail and, for the practically minded, Kamasutra position that helps lose weight – losing two stone with one bird, as it were.

There has been the expected amount of domestic violence. But most relationships don’t seem to have suffered from the claustrophobic circumstances. Some 88% of people living with someone else would lock themselves away with the same partner again, 84% are satisfied with their love life, and 73% with their sex life. A third of couples say they have become more in love during lockdown and only 10% say their relationship has worsened.

Little Richard has died at the age of 87.

I give you one of his best but least well-known records:

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention did a cover with Don Sugarcane Harris on violin.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,310, 80 in the past 24 hours. 22,624 people are in hospital, down 110, with 2,812 in intensive, care down 56. 56,038 patients have ben discharged from hospital, 256 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 54 – Why is France’s lockdown ending now?

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“Save lives, stay at home,” the government pleads. But will we?

Why is France ending lockdown on Monday? Even if hospital admissions and cases in intensive care are going down, the virus is still very much out there. People in power are antsy about the economy but the government is also clearly worried that confinement cannot be enforced much longer.

“They said we were an undisciplined people,” Emmanuel Macron said in his televised address in mid-April, without specifying who “they” were – probably the Anglo-Saxons. He went on to congratulate the nation for respecting rules that are “among the strictest ever imposed on our people in a time of peace”.

But that was over nearly a month ago and public patience has worn thin since.

Approval of Macron’s handling of the crisis slumped in April, from 51% to 43%. Meanwhile, the approval ratings of Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, are now higher than the president’s, down just two points to 46%.

That’s apparently led to tensions in what the media calls the “executive couple”, with reports that a reshuffle may be in the offing. There are rumours that Philippe has been putting out feelers about taking back his old job of mayor of Le Havre.

By Monday the French will have managed 55 days of lockdown, not as long as Italy and Spain, which were harder hit by the virus, but a long time, all the same.

I can see the signs of impatience in my neighbours – Marianne says she desperately wants to go to Paris, speculates that as many people may die from the effects of lockdown as from the virus, says it’s the government’s fault for not having enough masks and tests; Philippe stops anyone he can to chat, especially if they’re female, and clears the leaves in front of other neighbours’ doors; the rate of, technically lockdown-breaking, visits by families and friends has gone up.

You can’t enforce these measures without public consent and that is seeping away, as the intelligence services are probably telling a government whose authority has been undermined by its lies and U-turns over key aspects of the fight against the epidemic.

No nuance here: the deconfinement map

Poor old Hauts de France, the region in the north-east of the country that was classed orange, ie getting better, on the Coronavirus map earlier this week. But that nuance has disappeared when it comes to deconfinement.

So far as the post-lockdown regime is concerned, there will only be red and green and on 11 May Hauts de France will be red, in the naughty corner with ultra-infected Ile de France, Grand Est and Bourgogne-France Comté.

Testing and tracing are the new watchwords, and not before time.

The government promises to carry out 700,000 tests a week, aiming to identify 75% of cases, including asymptomatic ones.

Infected people and their families will be told to isolate, either at home or in hotels requisitioned for the purpose.

Doctors and other medical professionals will be responsible for finding out who they have been in contact with – there was talk of a bonus for doing that but MPs scrapped that idea. Specially established brigades will phone contacts, tell them to self-isolate and sometimes test them.

The definition of close contact will probably be someone who has been within a metre of an infected person without wearing a mask, according to reports.

The minister responsible for IT, Cédric O hopes the controversial StopCovid app will be ready in June.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,230, with 243 dying in the last 24 hours. 22,724 people are in hospital, down 484, and 2,868 are in intensive care, down 93. 55,782 people have been discharged from hospital, 755 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 53 – Macron’s haste to revive economy may mean less speed in beating Covid-19

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What’s striking about the plan to end France’s lockdown is how little constraint there is – especially on employers. This does not bode well for the brave new world we’ve been promised when the epidemic is over.

The Paris region is the worst hit by Covid-19. It’s also the most important for the economy, producing 30% of GDP. There is clearly a certain amount of haste to get people back to work, despite the clear danger of a second wave in one of the most densely populated parts of the world.

With cinemas, theatres, bars and restaurants still closed, the place you’re most likely to pick up the virus is on public transport. That will be up and running at 75% capacity on Monday, according to the people who run the Ile de France network.

Passengers will only be able to use every other seat and will have to wear face masks. In rush hour, 5.30 to 9.30 in the morning and from 15.30 to 19.30, you will only be allowed to ride the rails if you are on your way to work and can prove it with a declaration from your employer.

The government has appealed to people to keep working from home. Perhaps some employers are saving money on energy and maintenance, but won’t many of them put pressure on their workers to come to work? How many employees will feel able to resist such pressure and what protection do they have, if they do?

Many people are itching to leave home, inclined to confuse the end of lockdown with the end of the risk to their health and the virus is still out there, looking for people to infect.

I fear there will be packed métro and suburban trains on Monday, bringing the risk of a second wave.

The economy is in recession, companies are going out of business and jobs are being lost. Macron has promised a more socially and ecologically responsible country when the epidemic is over.

But a green economy won’t grow itself. This can’t be left to the invisible hand of the market. Instead of handing out unconditional aid to airlines and other big polluters, the state must syphon money from the industries that threaten our future into industries that are socially and environmentally responsible. And, if it wants to avoid a Gilets Jaunes-type backlash, it must guarantee jobs with equivalent pay and conditions to workers laid off because of the changes.

Capital will resist such action with cries of dirigisme and authoritarianism. I don’t see Macron, or any of our other present world leaders, facing down that pressure, do you?

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 25,987, up 178 in the past 24 hours. 23,208 people are in hospital, down 775 yesterday, with 2,961 in intensive care, down 775. 55,027 people have been discharged from hospital.

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