All posts by Tony Cross

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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Coronavirus diary day 52 – Warnings of second wave as France prepares to end lockdown

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The man in charge of guiding us out of lockdown has a relockdown plan up his sleeve, which is not reassuring. Nor are the findings of two studies that a second wave seems quite likely.

Jean Castex, the civil servant and right-wing politician who has been made Monsieur Déconfinement, has a reconfinement plan ready in case things go wrong, the AFP news agency reports.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is to announce details of the phased withdrawal from lockdown today. Some of the details that have been discussed so far have proved controversial, particularly the proposal to send some kids back to school.

Noting that there has been some lowering of preventive standards in recent days, Castex has warned that things can go wrong if people become too relaxed about anti-virus precautions.

The findings of two studies are not encouraging.

One, under the auspices of the Paris hospitals authority, has some good news. The widespread use masks – you know, those things the government said we didn’t really need a few weeks ago – combined with social distancing should reduce the risk of infection by 75%.

But that’s not enough for those at high risk – over-65s and people with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, hypertension and obesity. Unless they keep out of danger, the hospitals will be overwhelmed by mid-July, it finds, and there will be 87,100 deaths, instead of 33,500, between May and December.

By then herd immunity should have been reached, it adds, which I suppose is some sort of consolation, although we still don’t know if you can be reinfected.

The other study, also by Paris-based experts, predicts that reopening schools will probably lead to “a second wave similar to the one recently experienced” unless “maximum attendance is limited to 50% for both younger children and adolescents”.

A leap in infections can only be avoided if 50% of the population stay at home, ie most people continue to work from home, if the elderly come into contact with 75% fewer people than they would normally do, and if there is only a 50% rise in the number of shops reopening and other public activity, the study finds.

There also needs to be enough testing, tracing and isolation to identify 50% of cases and the human resources to carry this out, the study warns.

Two cops have been jailed and another given a suspended sentence for battering an Afghan refugee in Marseille, then whisking him off and dumping 30 kilometres away.

The senior officer, 46-year-old Michel Provenzano, was sent down for four years, longer than the three years the public prosecutor had called for. New recruit, 26-year-old Mathieu Coelho, was sentenced to 18 months, while a colleague, described in reports as “a young woman”, was given one year suspended.

The team stopped 27-year-old Jamshed S on the Old Port on suspicion of spitting on two people who had refused to give him cigarettes.

Annoyed by being subjected to “invective in Afghan” (!) and being given the finger, the “guardians of the peace”, as the French like to call police officers, got him in a half nelson and threw him against their van.

“That’s when Michel started to get annoyed,” Coelho testified.

They handcuffed him and took him to the woods at Châteauneuf-les-Martigues, where Provenzano slapped and punched him and broke his mobile phone. Then they drove off, leaving him there.

Well, at least the brigadier left his gun and sunglasses in the glove box, “so as not to do anything stupid”.

Another court this week heard the cases of youths arrested during the urban violence in Clichy-la-Garenne that followed the injury of a youth apparently knocked off his motorbike by the door of a police car.

Asked to explain what they were doing on the street after midnight, one defendant said he was going to see his grandfather, “who never answers his phone”, and two said they were going to get cigarettes.

“Clearly in Clichy people have an irresistible urge to smoke at night,” commented the magistrate.

“Do people do anything in the daytime in Clichy?” she wanted to know, after another defendant said he was on his way to the shop. “Do you all wait till 1.00am to go shopping?”

“There aren’t so many people at night,” replied Makram S.

“Given the testimony in this case, that’s open to question,” was her honour’s response.

Another philosophical question: What do you think of this tweet?

Personally, I haven’t been appealing to any gods during the epidemic.

But I do often invent my own superstitions – “If I do this right, then such-and-such desired outcome will take place” – and can’t help reciting “One for sorrow, two for joy” etc to myself every time I see magpies (it’s a British thing).

If you’re religious, you will probably take this as evidence that we non-believers recognise the truth of God’s – or gods’ – existence in spite of ourselves.

I think it proves that man created god.

We bargain with the Lord, touch wood or count magpies when faced with problems we feel helpless to resolve. That’s the same reason our ancestors, living in a world that could deprive them of food, shelter and loved ones on an apparent caprice, invented deities to intervene on their behalf against the vagaries of nature.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at  25,809, up 278 in the past 24 hours. 23,983 people are in hospital, down 792 yesterday, with 3,147 in intensive care, down 283. 53,972 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,236 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 51 – Now there’s a Covid-19 beer lake

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France is swimming in beer. The brewers say they will have to pour 10 million litres down the drain because bars, cafés and restaurants have been closed during lockdown. One reason for the glut is that drinkers’ standards have gone up recently.

First it was wine, then cheese, now there’s too much beer. The brewers’ organisation, Brasseurs de France, has announced that its members have litres of product going bad in the barrel. They are already receiving emergency loans but now they want an EU grant to help destroy unwanted stocks, a measure winemakers are also lobbying for.

Apparently, trendy craft beers are more difficult to keep than the industrialised bière blonde that used to be pretty much all you could find in France. That’s becausethey taste of something other than chemicals. They’re heavy on hops so they lose their flavour within about three months.

The traditional game of parliamentary ping-pong is back, with the government’s bill to handle the end of lockdown sent back to the lower house of parliament by the right-wing controlled Senate.

The upper house wants the health state of emergency to end on 10 July, instead of the 24 July, which the Macronists seem to be able to live with.

The senators have also amended the bill to protect bosses, mayors and local councillors from prosecution due to the implementation of deconfinement.

Always on the lookout for a way to eat away at laws that protect workers’ rights, the bosses’ union, Medef, has written to Labour Minister Muriel Pénicaud demanding immunity from prosecution if their employees fall ill.

There have been many complaints of inadequate protection – failure to enforce social distancing, not enough masks, insufficient hand gel – by people who have had to continue working.

The Medef, and the small business body CPME, argue that the fear of prosecution, even if it is unsuccessful in the end, will be unbearable and will hamper economic recovery.

“How can you prove that an employee caught the virus at work and not when he went to the butcher’s to buy meat?” asks Alain Grizet, from shopkeeper’s group U2P. “Everybody should be made safe: the consumer, the worker, the boss.”

And, with a wave of a magic wand, the class struggle is abolished!

The law does in fact protect employers, as long as they have taken the precautions deemed necessary, employment law expert Pascal Lokiec told Le Monde.

Victims of domestic violence  will not be placed in isolation with their abusive partners in the event of infection in the household, thanks to a Socialist amendment that was passed unanimously.

Good news from the north! All of the Hauts-de-France region, which used to be rather summarily known as Le Nord, has gone from red (high infection) to orange, which is better although not the green all-clear we all aspire to.

The region includes the Oise, north-east of Paris, which was one of the worst-hit areas early in the epidemic, partly due to a high rate of infection on a military base there.

The Désinfox page on the government’s website, which linked to articles exposing fake news about the virus, has been scrapped, after media outlets, including those whose publications were deemed linkable by the authorities, pointed out that the state is not the best arbiter on this question.

One journalist’s union had taken legal action to force closure.

Macron will consult selected luvvies today to prepare a rescue plan for the arts.

He will announce the outcome of his deliberations this afternoon.

Left-wing MP Alexis Corbière has laid into Culture Minister Franck Riester (I’ve always wondered whether he got the part on the strength of his showbizzy name) for refusing to propose come up with a plan until his boss had spoken.

Corbière told RFI that he wants the arts to receive as much as Air France, ie seven billion euros, pointing out that the sector employs 1.5 million people, “not just artists but also technicians, dressers …” and contributes seven times more to GDP than the car industry.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 25,531, 330 in the last 24 hours. 24,775 people are in hospital, down 773 yesterday, with 3,430 in intensive care, down 266. 52,736 patients have been discharged from hospital, 1,365 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 50 – French end-lockdown plan in trouble + How bad is humanity?

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“One mask per household from the council” it says. Photo: Tony Cross

We’ve received our municipal masks. Champigny town council has distributed masks to every household ahead of the end of lockdown. And the Communist mayor says he will defy the government order to reopen schools.

This morning there was a package sporting the town’s logo in our letterbox. Inside there were two anti-virus masks, although the envelope only promised one per household. Our neighbour Marianne hasn’t received hers, which is probably just an oversight because her house is right at the bottom of the close.

Inside is a note from the mayor, Christian Fautré, who definitely wants you to know that his administration is behind the initiative. The second round of local council elections, which are in frozen animation at the moment, will take place once this is all over.

Fautré is a member of the Communist Party, which has controlled the council for decades, although nowadays it is obliged to share power with the Socialists, France Insoumise and the Greens.

What was once the banlieue rouge is now in the zone rouge, marked red for hard-hit on the government’s Covid-19 map. 

Ile-de-France, the region that includes Paris, has been the hardest-hit part of the country. It has seen 95% more deaths than there would usually be at this time of year – 10,200 more between 1 March and 20 April.

Paris, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, has suffered badly, with 74% more deaths than usual. But the neighbouring départements have had it even worse – 130% more in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest département in mainland France, 122% more in Hauts-de-Seine, and 104% in Val-de-Marne, where we live.

Fautré is one of 33 mayors who have written to the president to say that the requirement to reopen schools on 11 May is unrealistic. On Monday he went further than his colleagues and declared he would refuse to obey the order.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has said that, if the recommended anti-virus precautions are taken, only 11% of the city’s pupils will be able to return to school.

There was more trouble for the government in the Senate yesterday. The right-wing controlled upper house of parliament rejected the plan for ending lockdown. It had sailed through the lower house thanks to an absolute majority of the ruling coalition.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told the senators that it was urgent to reopen schools and get the economy up and running again.

One concern is that local councils might find themselves in court if a child or teacher dies after the schools have gone back. Employers may share that concern, although the bill does have a clause saying that nobody can be held legally responsible for infections unless they have been caused deliberately or by conscious infringement of the rules.

Philippe admitted that the government is receiving conflicting advice from experts on whether there will be a second wave. Controversial Marseille medic Didier Raoult, who initially said the disease would not be that serious then claimed to be successfully treating it with hydroxcyhlorine, now says that the virus will probably die out in the summer, an opinion that is not shared by all his colleagues.

“We cannot offer you the confidence you are asking is for,” the top right-winger in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau, told Philippe, pointing to the government’s “contradictions” and “confusion” over masks and tests, a criticism that was echoed by the Socialists.

The clamour of lively philosophical debate issued from Marianne’s house as I was sitting in the sun the other day.

“No, you can’t tell me humans are superior to animals,” she told her boyfriend, Christian, with a great deal of audible conviction.

When they came outside, I told them they were both wrong.

The notions of superiority and inferiority, and of good and bad, are not objective but values dependent on human consciousness.

On the one hand, humans have created art, architecture, philosophy, literature, science. On the other, we’re responsible for war, slavery and class society, pollution and the devastation of nature and we could even destroy the planet, if a meteorite doesn’t get there first.

But the universe is indifferent to all that. Worlds, some with sentient life on them for all we know, vanish all the time. Nobody apart from ourselves is passing moral judgement on us, not even the creatures whose habitats we are destroying.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands, at 25,201, with 306 people dying yesterday. 25,548 people are in hospital, down 267 in the past 24 hours, while 3,696 are in intensive care, down 123. 51,371 people have been discharged from hospital, 587 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 49 – Brits don’t have to go into quarantine on arrival in France – is this wise?

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After announcing at the weekend that anyone entering France will be placed in 14 days’ quarantine, the government has said this will not apply to people from the EU, the Schengen area and the UK, the latter exception being extremely generous in the light of Brexit and Boris’s bungling of the Covid-19 crisis.

Given that Britain’s death toll has now overtaken France’s and that it is clearly at an earlier stage of fighting the virus, I doubt the wisdom of this otherwise-laudable lack of rancour.

With lockdown due to begin winding down in a week’s time (translation gripe: some English-speaking media are translating “progressif” as “progressive”, which must leave a lot of readers scratching their heads – in this context it means gradual, phased or staggered), there are concerns about the wisdom of reopening schools and the feasibility of social distancing on public transport.

Some 316 mayors, including Paris’s Anne Hidalgo, have demanded that reopening schools be postponed in the red zone – départements with high levels of infection – and especially in Ile de France. They say that the safety precautions required, which include classes of no more than 15, disinfecting material and no play, are “untenable and unrealistic”.

The government’s scientific panel at first advised that schools and universities should stay closed until September, before noting the political pressure to open sooner in a second opinion.

That didn’t prevent Health Minister Olivier Véran from telling Le Parisien that the expert had simply said schools should not reopen “as before” and so agreed with the government.

And what about the métro? How will social distancing be enforced in those narrow carriages and on those often-crowded platforms?

The Paris transport network, the RATP, the national rail operator, the SNCF, and other transport companies have warned there could be a danger to public order if they are left alone to enforce social distancing and mask wearing on public transport.

Even before déconfinement, this is the scene in one Paris métro station, as tweeted by a left-wing railworker:

With lockdown ending, employers, and the government, will pile on the pressure to get back to work, especially for those workers who have difficulty working from home.

There are also signs that people have had enough of four walls and will be encouraged to take too much advantage of their refound freedom. There is already much more traffic where I live and there seemed to be a lot of family visiting this weekend.

At this rate we’ve bought a group ticket to a second wave.

But maybe people have more sense than I give them credit for.

The public takes notice of public health advice if they have confidence in the authorities issuing it, Rony Brauman, the former head of Médécins Sans Frontières tells today’s Le Monde.

“Police measures can’t work indefinitely,” he says, drawing on the experience of previous epidemics in Asia, Africa and Haiti. The long-term solution to an epidemic lies in people learning to adopt new habits.

It would have been pointless forcing over-65s to stay at home, Brauman believes. “They have no wish to catch this disease!”

Pointing out that the French government’s misleading statements about masks and tests have undermined confidence in it, he adds, “I only hope that it will be rebuilt, but that largely depends on the government.”

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,895, up 135. 25,815 people are in hospital with the virus, down 12 in a day, with 3,819 in intensive care, down eight. 50,784 patients have been discharged from hospital, 222 of them yesterday.

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