The police are on France’s streets and they’re moving in packs.
Yesterday evening I took a stroll to the bottom of the courtyard where I live – it’s private, so I assume I can do so without a signed declaration – to see how much activity there was on the main road.
Coming up the street opposite was a squad of cops, filling the pavement, two lines deep, looking menacing in their dark blue uniforms and face masks. I scuttled back to my house just in case the courtyard isn’t private enough.
It was surprising to see how numerous they were. Is this the case everywhere or do they hunt in bigger packs in the banlieue? Are they expecting trouble? I’ve heard no reports of anything serious, although I suppose there must be some awkward customers.
More than 225,000 tickets have been issued for non-compliance with the lockdown rules.
The sighting gave me an anecdote for my phone intervention on Upfront, on KPFA radio in Berkeley. Other guests included a US journalist just back from Iran, where right-wing fanatics have defied closure of religious sites, and a young American woman locked down in Varanasi, where foreigners find themselves blamed for bringing the virus.
A TGV high-speed train was adapted earlier in the week as part of an operation to move patients out of the worst-hit regions – Ile de France (around Paris) and the Grand Est (Alsace, the Vosges, Lorraine) – to areas where the hospitals are not so overburdened.
There have also been three airlifts and there will be a fourth today, from Mulhouse, in the east, to Bordeaux.
Over a million people left the Paris region between 13 and 20 March. That’s 17% of the population.
The statistics are an estimate based on Orange tracking people’s mobile phones, which is a bit spooky.
Apparently, they were leaving Paris’s posher arrondissements in droves on the day before lockdown and some blocks of flats are as empty as they are during the summer holidays.
The population of the Ile de Ré, a popular place to have a holiday home in Brittany, has risen 30%.
Now we learn that this was a bad thing to do, spreading the virus to areas that had not been hit, although there was non official warning against it, so far as I know.
I must confess that if I had that country house I want to buy in the Jura and had no symptoms, I would probably have gone to it without thinking of the implications. It’s what people do in times of plague, if they can. I mean, The Decameron, right?
Parisians are not that popular in the rest of France at the best of times. They’re even less popular now.
Author Leïla Slimani’s lyrical lockdown diary, written in her country house, has aroused some indignation among city-dwellers stuck in their less-than-capacious apartments.
In Russia they recommended people go to their dachas, so there’s a cultural difference, right there, eh?
How tragic that confinement has made it necessary to set up a domestic violence alert system in pharmacies.
The prefect of the Aisne, north-west of Paris, this week went so far as to ban the sale of alcohol in an effort to limit violence in the home.
His name being Ziad Khoury, right-wing bloggers worked themselves into a lather about an attack on the French way of life.
Other commentators questioned the practicality of the measure and the ban has been lifted.
The Guardian’s Egypt correspondent, Ruth Michaelson, who also did freelance work for RFI when I worked there, has been kicked out of the country for writing an article questioning the reliability of the official Covid-19 statistics.
Unsurprisingly, I suppose, Sisi trolls have been kind enough to tell her this is a good thing on her Twitter feed. So, apparently, there are people who actually want to be poorly informed about the danger to their health.
The number of deaths in French hospitals reached 1,696 on Thursday, up 365 in the previous 24 hours. A 16-year-old died in Ile de France. There are 3,375 people in intensive care, while 4,948 people have been able to leave hospital having been declared cured.
