All posts by Tony Cross

Coronavirus diary day 48 – Is France really ready to end lockdown?

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A poster welcomes “responsible” mask-wearers to Champigny Photo: Tony Cross

After a cabinet meeting yesterday the papers are claiming that the rules for post-lockdown France are becoming clear. I’m glad they think so, the government’s announcements don’t seem particularly earth-shattering to me.

Here are the main decisions:

  • Anyone arriving in the country will be placed in quarantine, which can’t be longer than 30 days. By the way, the French quaintly call 14 days’ quarantine a “quatorzaine”, since they speak what is essentially a dialect of Latin and quarantaine still shows its origins as a period of 40 days, apparently the time Venetians obliged plague-infested ships to remain isolated if they arrived on their shores;
  • Infected people will be expected to isolate themselves and their households, either at home or in hotels set aside for that purpose, but this will not be legally enforced;
  • Tracing the infected and those they have been in contact with will take place but not via the controversial StopCovid app. It will be done by doctors and other health professionals and there will be regional and national data banks.
  • Various quasi-police officers, such as security officers on public transport, will have the power to stop and check people. We won’t have to fill in forms to leave home, so they won’t have those to look at, but their duties will probably include making people wear masks on public transport, enforcing safety precautions in shops and stopping people stray more than 100km from their homes.

It is still unclear to me what the difference between red (high infection), orange (medium infection) and green (virus-free) zones will be.

The announcements are accompanied with appeals not to drop our guard. But this seems to be happening already.

There is more traffic on the roads than there were a couple of weeks ago, there are more cars parked on Champigny’s Place Lénine, where the Chinese greengrocers has reopened and the bookshop is taking orders to be collected two afternoons a week, and my neighbours are coming out of their homes to sweep in front of their front doors and chat.

Italy has reported a rise in deaths, ahead of its phased ending of strict lockdown. Those people must have caught the virus a week or two ago but there does appear to have been a relaxation of precautions there as deconfinement approached.

The Algerian Kabyle singer Idir has died.  I saw him perform with French singer Maxime Le Forestier in the grounds of the Palais Royal one Fête de la musique. They changed the French song Paris s’éveille into Tizi Ouzou s’éveille, in honour of the main town in Kabylie.

Idir’s song Avava Inouva heralded a renaissance of Kabyle culture, my friend Omar Bouraba comments on Facebook. “It gave us back pride and colours and we needed that.

“I remember as a kid when the song arrived on our old radios, for my family a Grundig,” he goes on. “We often subscribed to buy batteries to listed to Idir. We didn’t have electricity.

“Later, as an immigrant, I learnt how precious his songs were to help bear the absence and how easy it was to make connections, to exchange with other cultures thanks to Idir’s songs.”

Desperate for a haircut after lockdown? Try this hairdresser, which appears to be somewhere in French-speaking Africa.

The advertising slogan is “Come inside ugly, leave pretty.” Admit you’re tempted.

The photo appeared on a rather niche Facebook page devoted to French shopfronts 1950-75. Well, I like that sort of thing.

Paris’s rue de Rivoli will be closed to private cars as part of the city council’s fight against pollution.

Here’s how it looked in 1863, before the invention of the infernal internal combustion engine. I don’t think they plan to bring back the horse-drawn vehicle.

Rue de Rivoli, Photo Hippolyte Jouvin 1863

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,760, 166 in the past 24 hours. 25,827 people are in hospital, down 60 in a day, with 3,827 in intensive care, down 51. 50,562 people have been discharged from hospital, 350 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 47 – Covid-19 boosts economy … with the truth

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At home, prepare the revolution, Poster by Atélier Youpi

The French government has opened an anti-fake news page on its website. Meanwhile, the health minister has assured us that more tests would not have reduced the number of Covid-19 cases, the official map of infection levels has had to be revised, and leaked documents show there will not be enough masks until June.

“The Coronavirus crisis encourages the spread of #fakenews,” the government’s indefatigable spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye declared in a tweet on Thursday.

So the government’s website now has a page linking to “viable and verifiable sources”. At least the sites are not run by the government. They are the fact-checkers of established media, such as Le Monde and Libération.

But these ingrates have not all been delighted by the official endorsement, which itself could lead the disaffected to see them as firmly ensconced in the establishment.

On top of which, some well-known media outlets, for example right-wing Le Figaro, left-wing Médiapart and the regional press, don’t figure on the good-guys list.

With immaculate timing, Health Minister Olivier Véran on the same day told LCI television, “A test doesn’t cure, it doesn’t change the treatment or the diagnosis … If we had tested absolutely everybody we would have more or less the same number of people ill.”

In South Korea, which is next door to China and has almost as big a population as France, there have been 10,780 confirmed Covid-19 cases, compared to France’s 130,185, (both figures are undoubtedly underestimates even if Véran implied in the same interview that the French statistics were accurate). South Korea’s death toll is 250, compared to France’s 24,594.

South Korea’s success in fighting the virus is universally attributed to a strict policy of testing, tracing and treating.

After publishing a map with three départements with practically no Covid-19 cases marked as heavily infected, the national health authority has been forced to issue a new one, having admitted that the original statistics were based on irrelevant information.

And Le Monde reveals that interior ministry internal documents point out that the masks that we are all supposed to wear in public once lockdown is lifted are unevenly distributed across the country, leading to the risk “that some French people will have too many and others won’t be able to find any”.

Not to worry though, the number of masks has “considerably risen in the last few weeks” and the situation should be sorted out by June, when we initially hoped all this would be over.

Let’s take a look back at our lockdown May Day.

Here’s a piper playing the Internationale on a Paris street.

The words to the Internationale were written by Eugène Pottier, who was elected to the Paris Commune and wrote them while in hiding from the repression that crushed it.

He fled to the USA and returned to France when an amnesty was declared in 1880.

The music was composed by Pierre de Geyter, a Belgian who lived in the northern French town of Lille, until he was obliged to leave because the bosses blacklisted him as a dangerous revolutionary.

And here and at the top of this post are some graphics for couch-stranded rebels, produced by the Atélier Youpi, which in normal times operates out of Saint Denis, the working-class town on the northern outskirts of Paris.

Stay/Resist at home Altélier Youpi

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,594, up 218 in the last 24 hours. 25,887 people are in hospital, down 396, with 3,878 in intensive care, down 141. 50,212 people have been discharged from hospital, 736 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 46 – A May Day minus manifs and muguet

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Facebook sent me one of those reminders of what I was doing this time last year this morning – photos of teargas, black blockers, Yellow Vests and trade unionists on last year’s May Day demonstration. (You can see the pictures and read my account of the day here.)

There’ll be none of that this year. Although this loyal union activist set off for the manif. “It’s habit!” she declares.

Given that they can’t march, the unions, who as usual can’t agree on joint demands and action, are trying to “occupy the visible space”, ie post things online.

The most left-wing ones, the CGT, Solidaires and the teachers’ union FSU, have for the first time joined forces with ecology campaigners, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to call for more resources for public services, repatriation of capital that has fled abroad and better conditions for those workers who have proved themselves vital during the crisis.

Supporters of the party that used to be called the Front National can watch video of their leaders placing a wreath on the Paris statue of Joan of Arc and slog their way through an hour-long speech by Marine Le Pen.

Muguet, Photo Kajebi II (Wikimedia Commons)

Also absent from the streets will be sellers of muguet (lily of the valley). The French give each other bunches of the flowers in the spring. The charming tradition apparently goes back to the Middle Ages and there are different legends as to which king, queen or other aristocrat started it.

The association with May Day itself has its downside. Before World War II left-wingers apparently used to wear dog roses on International Workers’ Day. The collaborationist Pétain government felt obliged to rebrand the communistic festival, renaming it Labour Day and encouraging people to wear the “national” muguet. The poor old dog rose never made a comeback.

Gaul is divided into three parts, almost. The government’s Covid-19 map has three categories, red (bad), orange (could do better) and green (soon-to-be-liberated). It will be revised before 11 May but it gives a good idea of which areas will be kept in some sort of lockdown.

The classification is based on three criteria: The estimated level of infection in a département, how overstretched hospitals are, and the capacity to carry out tests (there are actually two different maps, one for each of the first two criteria).

The north-east of the country, including the Paris region, is red, as are three other départements, one of them overseas. The south-east and much of the centre is orange. And most of the west and the Channel coast is green.

But no sooner had the map been published than some regional leaders claimed their fiefdoms should not be classed red at all. There have been hardly any cases in the north of Corsica, the south-western département of the Lot and the Cher in the centre.

In the Lot there are only 15 people in hospital at the moment, down from 27 a week ago, and only one in intensive care, down from nine.

Health officials say the confusion is due to errors in the way the statistics on admissions to emergency departments have been compiled.

They have a week to get their shit together, since the map drawn up on 7 May will decide which areas can go for full on déconfinement and which will remain under a form of lockdown, although what that means in details still seems unclear to me.

Are we dropping our guard? There seemed to be more traffic on the streets when I last made a trip to the shops, to days ago. My former colleague Jessica Phelan has also noticed this in Italy.

A new poll shows a slight drop in observation of anti-virus precautions in France, although the use of masks has risen.

We don’t want a second wave, people!

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,376, 289 in the past 24 hours. 26,283 people are in hospital, down 551 in the last day, with 4,019 in intensive care, down 188. 49,476 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,248 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 45 – Happy locked-down birthday, Mother!

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It’s Mum’s 96th birthday. She agreed that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment, once I had reminded her that it was her birthday and how old she was. We’ve made it through the epidemic so far, so that’s another accomplishment. Coming out of lockdown and a second wave, if it comes, will bring other challenges.

Mum in the courtyard earlier this month (when it was sunny)

I’ve promised we’ll open a good bottle this evening. “Peter [my brother] will have to come and share it,” she said. Another reminder: “He can’t, because we’re locked down because of the virus.”

The memory is going. I’ve given up rehearsing the anti-Covid precautions with her. Even if she remembers them, she ignores them. “You should wash your hands for 20 seconds!” “I don’t know how long 20 seconds is.” “Don’t take your teeth out unless you’ve washed your hands first.” She looks at me like a naughty schoolkid: “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

So both of us staying well means me being extra-careful not to bring the virus into the house. Unpacking the shopping is especially tedious but I expect you all know that by now.

Mum also has macular degeneration, which has been gradually depriving her of her eyesight for over 15 years. Eating is a chore now because she can hardly see what’s on her plate, meaning that she often puts an almost-empty fork to her mouth. She’s too proud to use a spoon.

She has survived my Dad by a bit more than 10 years now. I moved to Champigny so that she could move in. I couldn’t have afforded a two-bedroom home in Paris itself.

Despite her memory and eyesight problems, I think she’s fairly happy here.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The fall in air pollution due to lockdown has saved 11,000 lives, the recently established Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Creca) estimates. Given the epidemic’s death toll, this is a bit of a win-some-lose-some situation but it could lead to more responsible environmental policies after it’s over. Or is that too much to hope?

“Other avoided health impacts include 1.3 million fewer days of work absence, 6,000 fewer new cases of asthma in children, 1,900 avoided emergency room visits due to asthma attacks and 600 fewer preterm births,” Creca tells us, although, as one imagines they have noticed, there’s more win-some-lose-some so far as days off work are concerned.

The study actually puts the number of lives saved as between 7,000 and 21,000.

The reason is a fall of 40% in nitrogen dioxide emissions and of 10% in fine particle emissions. That’s because of drastic cuts in consumption of energy produced by coal and oil burning, as well as a reduction in road traffic.

If I understand the science, fine particle pollution has fallen less than nitrogen dioxide because of agriculture and wood-burning. Another study shows that halving the use of ammonia in farming – which was responsible that bucolic smell that has wafted over Paris at times during lockdown – could reduce early deaths from air pollution in Europe by 20%.

Lockdown has inspired some major cities to adopt more ambitious environmental policies. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has in the past been vilified by the right because of her moves to clear cars from the city centre.

Last year’s transport strikes reportedly changed some right-wing voters’ minds about the virtues of cycling. Maybe lockdown-induced blue skies will convince more people that we can’t go back to breathing filthy air.

The French government has promised 20 million euros to encourage bike riding once lockdown is over. As one of the few people in the world who never learnt to ride a bike, I have mixed feelings about this. It will definitely increase my chances of being mown down by a wannabe Tour de France winner while I’m strolling the city streets.

These photos of empty city streets. Am I the only one to be singularly unimpressed by them?

Didn’t any of you ever go out early in the morning or on public holidays?

I have one vivid memory of riding a bus through the Louvre – the complex not the museum – on my way to work one Christmas morning. Nobody there. But I did see one or two intrepid Japanese tourists elsewhere in the city.

Back to the bad news. France’s GDP fell 5.8% in the first quarter of 2020, the biggest fall since 1949, greater even that the 5.3% decline called by the strikes in the second quarter of 1968. The period includes the first fortnight of lockdown, so this quarter will be equally grim, if not worse.

The eurozone’s GDP has fallen 3.8%.

France’s unemployment rose a record 7.1% in March. Household spending was down 17.9%.

The health state of emergency is set to be extended for another two months.

France’s Covid-19 death toll is now officially 24,087, up 427 in 24 hours. 26,834 Covid-19 patients are in hospital, down 650 in 24 hours, with 4,207 in intensive care, down 180. 48,228 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,342 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 44 – France’s colour-coded deconfinement plan seems a little vague

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So how lockdown ends will vary across the country after all. First Macron said it would be “decentralised”, then media reports said it would be the same everywhere, as befits France’s Jacobin tradition. But when Prime Minister Edouard Philippe took the stand to unveil the déconfinement plan yesterday, he said it would be prudent, staggered and differ according to how badly hit your area has been.

There are to be red (badly hit) and green (little affected) départements. Which is which will be decided on 7 May, four days before lockdown is lifted.

There can be no doubt that the Paris region, Ile de France, will be red, since it has been worst hit by the virus, followed by the Grande Est, which includes Alsace and Lorraine. Since Ile de France produces 30% of national wealth, that’s bad news for hopes of economic recovery.

Raphaël, the local council employee who phones to check on Mum’s health, said that he and his colleagues spent yesterday drawing up plans for lockdown end, only to find that their efforts may have been wasted because of the regional variation.

On what this actually means, Philippe was a little short on specifics. Secondary schools will be slower to reopen in red areas, it seems, and parks and gardens will remain closed. Face masks will probably be obligatory on public transport and using the network during rush hour will probably limited to passengers going to work, who will probably have to be able to prove that is what they are doing to inspectors.

At a national level, working from home will be encouraged, older people leaving home will be discouraged and the authorisation slip allowing you to leave home will no longer be needed, unless you are over 100km away from your address, which is only allowed for urgent family or business reasons to stop the virus spreading.

There is supposed to be careful tracking of cases and those they have been in contact with, with a promise of 700,000 tests a week after 11 May – at last!

But the government chickened out of proposing its tracking app, which has proved controversial even among Macronists. That will be debated on a separate occasion.

Liberals in the US are hailing a journalist’s observation that the epidemic has now killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam War as a masterful put-down of Donald Trump.

The war was indeed traumatic for their country and the number of young men killed tragic, especially since many were either conscripted or forced into the military by economic circumstances. There were 58,220 of them, according to the US National Archives.

But aren’t we forgetting something here?  Estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from one million to over three million, not counting those killed in Cambodia and Laos. They seem to have been largely wiped from the US national memory.

This time round, Vietnam is generally held to have handled the virus well, with only 270 confirmed cases and no deaths, despite its proximity to China.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 23,660, 367 yesterday. 27,484 people are in hospital, a fall of 571 in 24 hours, with 4,387 in intensive care, down 221. 46,886 patients have been discharged from hospital, 1,373 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 43 – The police, the banlieue and lockdown

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As the nation awaits this afternoon’s announcement on the end of lockdown, the main news stories are back to the old abnormal – police brutality and a possible terror attack.

The most recent story is an attack on police in Colombes, near Paris. Yesterday afternoon a man drove a BMW at speed at police checking traffic, injuring two of them, one seriously, and crushing a police motorbike against a police car.

He has a police record for criminal activity about 10 years ago but was not on the national terror watch list.

The attacker reportedly told arresting officers that he was inspired to attack the police after watching videos of the situation in Gaza and that he wanted to die a martyr.

The case has not yet been classified a terror attack but may be.

On Sunday, at 2.00am to be precise, police were allegedly caught on video appearing to racially abuse a man in a scene that is followed by banging and screams.

The man is reported to have jumped into the Seine while trying to flee the police. After catching him, they appear to mock him, using a racial insult reserved for north Africans, and suggesting that the colleague who caught him should have weighed him down rather than fished him out of the river.

Later, although it is dark, one can hear the van doors slam, thuds, and what seem to be screams and laughter.

The video, reportedly filmed by a local resident, was put online by Taha Bouhafs, the journalist and activist who broke the story of presidential security guard Alexandre Benalla’s assault of demonstrators during a May Day demonstration in 2018.

Since then he has had his troubles with the police, being violently arrested while filming an undocumented workers’ protest in the Val-de-Marne in 2019 and charged with “outrage”, a catch-all accusation often levelled against people found insufficiently cooperative by the forces of law and order.

After he made the name of the arresting officer public, a police trade union published a graphic accusing him of having rabies and stirring up “anti-cop hatred”.

An inquiry into the alleged assault on Bouhafs was launched.

He was arrested again in 2020 after tweeting the news that the president was in the audience of a play he was watching.

The tweet prompted a small group of opponents of the government’s pension reform to descend on the theatre and try to enter, leading to Macron being forced to leave.

Bouhafs was detained on leaving the show, accused of planning acts of violence and vandalism and participation in an unauthorised demonstration.

Lockdown has done nothing to improve relations between the banlieue and the police, who are accused of using the extra powers it has given them as extra excuses to harass people in deprived areas.

Last week there was urban violence in Seine Saint Denis after a motorcyclist’s leg was broken when he hit the open door of a police car. He has admitted speeding but denies knowing it was a police car.

And in Champigny, as I mentioned in an earlier post, a home-made mortar was fired at the police station.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 23,293, 437 in the past 24 hours. 28,055 patients are in hospital, down 162 yesterday, and 4,608 are in intensive care, down 74. 45,513 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 42 – Is digital snooping a price worth paying to fight the virus?

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The French parliament is to vote on the government’s post-lockdown plan as a single package. That means there will be no separate vote on the controversial tracking app that critics say will mean more digital surveillance of our lives.  

MPs are to vote on the plan tomorrow after it has been presented by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. It will then be presented to local council representatives, unions and employers the following day.

The hasty vote has come under fire from France Insoumise leader Jean-Muc Mélenchon on the left and Républicains leader Damien Abad on the right.

Even some of members of the ruling party are said to be unhappy that there will be no separate debate on the proposed StopCovid app, as they had been given to understand there would be.

Downloading the app, which will track you to see if you have been in contact with an infected person, will be voluntary and anonymous.

Some scientists argue that traditional practices can’t cope with Covid-19 and that immediate tracing of contacts is needed to combat the hyperinfectious virus.

Similar tools have been used in some Asian countries. South Korea was able to avoid lockdown at the cost of only 243 lives so far in part thanks to a similar app, although that was combined with far more extensive testing than what is on offer in France.

Critics warn that it could lead to yet more digital snooping than we already have, with data possibly exploited by the state for other purposes, such as limiting immigration, or by private companies, as happened in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The French government has already accessed mobile phone data to estimate how many people fled to their holiday homes before lockdown and several European countries, including Italy and Austria, have used digital tracking to help enforce their lockdowns.

That hasn’t stopped some commentators posing the question as a difference between Asian and European attitudes to individual liberties, as they have also suggested that Asians’ readiness to wear masks is “cultural”, rather than a result of their recent experience of epidemics and stifling levels of pollution.

As from today we can buy masks in French pharmacies, if we can overcome our cultural misgivings, which I suspect most of us will.

Another day, another study. This time researchers bring the cheery news that fewer lives are saved in intensive care than French officials have implied.

Health boss Jérôme Salomon previously announced that 10% of Covid-19 patients admitted to intensive care died. Researchers at Reva, a European artificial ventilation network, say that the real figure is now 30-40%.

On the bright side, a study in New South Wales appears to show that kids aren’t as toxic as we feared. Commissioned to prepare for the reopening of schools, it found that no teachers in the state had been infected by their pupils and that half of all cases identified were teachers.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,856, 252 in the last 24 hours. 28,217 patients are in hospital, down just five yesterday, and 4,682 are in intensive care, down 43. 44,903 people have been discharged from hospital, 309 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 41 – Tension at the top as France prepares to end lockdown

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Prime Minister Edouard Philippe will tell us on Tuesday how we are to be deconfined. We already have a fair idea, since the proposals of the government’s scientific advisers have been made public and, of course, we all now listen to the experts – as long as we’re not Donald Trump.

Except apparently the government didn’t accept their advice on reopening schools. The committee at first proposed keeping them closed until September but in a second opinion accepted the “political decision of a prudent and gradual reopening”, while suggesting that it should be voluntary and that learning at distance should be maintained where necessary.

It is not clear whether the government is most concerned about children’s education returning to normality or their parents being able to return to their workplaces. Maybe both, eh?

So far as those workplaces are concerned, the scientists want working from home to continue wherever it is feasible – that’s going to become more common anyway, now we’ve discovered how practical it can be, isn’t it? – and office hours to be staggered to reduce crowding on public transport, where we will all probably have to wear masks, social distancing being judged unviable by the Paris transport network.

The word “discrimination” having been uttered, there will be no compulsory extension of lockdown for the over-65s but, given the extra risk for older people, the experts advise them to observe a “strict and voluntary” stay-at-home policy.

Most shops and businesses will reopen on 11 May but not bars and restaurants or museums and other places where large numbers of people may gather, a category that seems to include parks and gardens.

Preparing the end of lockdown seems to have been a fractious business, so far as the government is concerned.

Macron having announced that all would be ready on 11 May, he did not take kindly to some of his ministers prevaricating, according to the Journal du Dimanche.

There has even been tension between Macron and Philippe, which is “unprecedented” according to the paper.

The president himself seems to have dropped the idea of regional variations and the country’s mayors, who are important local powerbrokers, have told him that it is up to the government to draw up the rules, which they promise to implement.

A sad note on a Champigny Facebook page: A woman whose father recently died reports that the family home has been burgled. A bag containing his harmonicas, “the only thing I had to remember him by”, was stolen.

Given that they do not have much monetary value, she hopes that the burglars may have dumped them and that someone might find them and return them to her.

“The thieves, if you see this message and you still have a bit of humanity, please put them back in the letter box so that I can do my grieving,” she concludes.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,614, 369 in the past 24 hours. 28,222 people are in hospital, a fall of 436 in 24 hours, with 4,725 in intensive care, down 145. 44,594 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,101 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 40 – The sordid history of the Covid-19 pseudo-cure Trump publicised

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The bleach-based “miracle cure” mentioned by Donald “Sarcastic” Trump during a Coronavirus briefing on Thursday has been knocking about since 2006, despite numerous warnings about its potentially harmful effects. It was foisted on Ugandans last year, thanks to a US-based pseudo-church.

Screen shot of the Uganda use of MMS

The Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) is made from the industrial bleach chlorine dioxide mixed with citric acid. It can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

It can also kill you by inducing low blood pressure due to dehydration. A Mexican woman travelling in a yacht with her American husband off Vanuatu died after taking MMS in 2009, Wikipedia tell us.

Despite warnings by health authorities in the US, the UK, Australia, Belgium and France, a New Jersey pastor called Robert Baldwin, working with British “clairvoyant” Sam Little, imported bulk shipments of the components of MMS, sodium chlorite and citric acid, into Uganda from China, the Guardian reported last year.

Through a network of 1,200 pastors, the most enthusiastic of whom were given smartphones, some 50,000 Ugandans, including children as young as 14 months old, were given the fake medicine, diluted in water.

Baldwin’s Global Healing ministry claimed it was a cure for cancer, HIV/Aids, malaria and pretty much anything else you care to think of.

After the Guardian exposed the scam, he shut down his operations, telling NJ Advance Media “People are calling me Satan.” This seems to have come as a surprise.

Baldwin chose Uganda because it was a poor country with weak regulation, as he told Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against quack medicine who spoke to him posing as a freelance journalist.

“Those people in poor countries they don’t have the options that we have in the richer countries,” he said. “They are much more open to receiving the blessings that God has given them.”

Two French scientists were recently slammed for suggesting that Coronavirus drug trials should be run in Africa, where multinationals have tested other drugs in the past.

WHO boss Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the idea “racist” and a hangover of “colonial mentality” and there was an outcry on social media.

Less-than-successful trials in the developing world haven’t deterred mumbo-jumbo peddlers from pushing their product in the imperial heartland, now that a lot of worried people opens up the gullible market.

The bleach cure idea appears to have been planted in Trump’s disorderly brain by another US MMS advocate, the self-styled “Bishop” Mark Grenon, the Guardian reports.

Grenon, who runs Genesis II – a Florida-based establishment that claims to be a church and which is the largest MMS producer and distributor in the US – wrote to Trump earlier in the week, claiming the bleach mix could cure Covid-19.

Even before Trump’s statement, he was bragging about this initiative in a video on the Genesis II website.

“Trump has got the MMS and all the info!!! Things are happening folks! Lord help others to see the Truth!” he exalted on his Facebook page, which also carries posts relating to various conspiracy theories, on Friday.

Now that the US’s Food and Drug Administration has repeated its warnings about MMS, posts on the Genesis II website have become more defensive, accusing the FDA of “attacks on our Sacraments” and pleading “THIS INSANITY HAS TO STOP!!” (their capitals, obviously).

The term MMS seems to have been dreamt up by the founder and archbishop of Genesis II, former Scientologist Jim Humble, in a self-published book, The Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century.

Tracked down in Mexico by ABC News in 2016, he told reporters, “MMS cures nothing”.

A website jimhumble.co continues to describe his “discovery” of chlorine dioxide’s supposed properties as “a breakthrough that can save your life”, however.

Grenon continues to carry the flame. And sell the product.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,245, up 389 in 24 hours. 28,658 people are in hospital, down 561 in a day, 4,870 In intensive care, down 183. 43,493 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 39 – Don’t cheer healthworkers if you don’t want to pay tax

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If the Covid-19 epidemic has proved one thing, it’s that there is such a thing as society. A French opinion poll shows people valuing health and the environment far more than individualistic concerns such as spending power and law and order or that hobby horse of conventional economists, the deficit and public debt.

The epidemic is the principal worry of 76% of respondents, the health service comes second at 42% and global warming 33%.

Spending power comes next at 31%, the deficit and debt 24%, unemployment only scores 18% and the hard right’s favourite dog whistle, law and order, a mere 16%.

Of course, all this can change. There could be an orgy of self-indulgence once the first wave of the virus is over.

But there are signs that some lessons have been well implanted in the public mind. The importance of the health service seems to be solidly established. Combating the virus has shown us how interdependent we are, that if one person is infected, that is a threat to the rest of us, that we can’t afford to say “Fuck you, I’m virus-proof!” and that we must act collectively to prevent its spread.

But it remains to be seen whether people will be ready to pay for public services.

Because, frankly, if you’re applauding healthworkers every evening but voted for politicians because they promised to cut your taxes, donning sack-cloth and ashes would be a more appropriate gesture.

The right’s greatest ideological victory has been to convince large swathes of the middle and working classes that they have a community of interest with the rich in cutting taxes. They have succeeded in making this the electorally decisive question in Europe and the US.

They have done so with the complicity of the social democrats, who “realistically” took fright at being labelled tax-and-spenders and swallowed economic liberalism whole. Even the real left usually dodges the question, because it is, indeed, difficult to convince people that they should sacrifice the immediate pleasure of disposable income to the social investment in public services.

Of course, the pillaging of society by the rich – in tax dodges, soaring dividend payouts, huge CEO salaries etc – has to be reversed. But that won’t be enough. Public services can’t be maintained and expanded without ordinary people contributing to their finances. And it’s important that we all understand that these services are our common property, that we invest in. You can’t have socialism – or even welfare capitalism – without that.

Nor can we save the planet without accepting some radical changes to our daily lives.

The crazed SUV-driving hordes demonstrating against lockdown in the US will fight against this. But it is encouraging that they are a small minority. On the other hand, they have guns.

And it remains to be seen whether today’s epidemo-Keynesians will revert to free-economy form once the crisis has subsided and whether there will be popular mobilisation to prevent them doing so.

As Donald Trump suggests that people might be injected with disinfectant to fend off Covid-19, there have been disappointments in the search for a cure.

Researchers in China found the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir didn’t improve patients’ conditions or reduce the amount of virus in their bloodstream, according to the Financial Times.

And a French drugs watchdog has found 54 cases of serious heart problems due to the use of hydroxochloroquine, the anti-malaria drug championed by Marseille doctor Didier Raoult and touted as a possible cure by Trump. There were four sudden or unexplained deaths and a total of 96 cases of undesirable side-effects, the Centre régional de pharmacovigilance (CRPV) in Nice reports.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now stands at 21,856, 516 in the last 24 hours. 29,219 people are in hospital, 522 fewer than the previous day, and 5,053 are in intensive care, down 165. 42,088 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,413 of them yesterday.

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