All posts by Tony Cross

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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Coronavirus diary day 38 – Lockdown tensions rise as government prepares to end it

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How do we get out of lockdown? The president has set a date, 11 May, but the plan is a bit short on details at the moment.

There are signs of tension, reports of vandalism and some clashes with police in parts of the banlieue, where some large families live in cramped conditions and many young people have strained relations with the forces of law and order.

A still from video of the attack in Bois l’Abbé

Last night shots from home-made mortars were fired at the police station in Champigny, which is situated on a housing estate in the Bois l’Abbé neighbourhood. There were two incidents, one just before 1.00am, the other at 3.30am, according to reports.

A CRS riot police officer was slightly injured and a police vehicle damaged.

The attackers fled the scene and have not been caught.

Videos have been posted online, including one apparently filmed by the attackers.

Raphaël, the council employee who phones to check on Mum every day, says that isolation is taking its psychological toll on some of the elderly people he talks to. One old lady was desperately sad not to have been able to hold her great grand-daughter, who has been born while lockdown has been in place.

The latest news is that lockdown exit is likely to be applied differently in different parts of the country – so there should be relatively tough restrictions in the Paris region for some time yet.

The president is considering a déconfinement that varies according to how local authorities judge the situation in their area, sources have told Le Monde, which comments that “Emmanuel Macron is not as Jacobin as people think”, according to his supporters.

In hypercentralised France it really is quite daring to leave such initiatives to the regions. But it makes sense, given the disparate effect of the epidemic.

Along the Atlantic coast the rate of hospitalisation it between 0.9 and 1.9 per 1,000, with rural areas less affected than those where the cities of Rennes and Bordeaux are situated.

Val-de-Marne, where I live, seems to have the highest rate in the country, at 14.9 per 1,000, although Paris has a higher per capita death rate – 6.0 per 1,000, compared to 5.8 per 1,000 here.

Although the proportion of their population in hospital is lower, the death toll in Haut Rhin and Territoire de Belfort, in the east, is even grimmer, 8.5 and 10.0 respectively.

Paris has the highest total of deaths – 1,288, compared to 817 in Val-de-Marne, 646 in Haut Rhin and 140 in Territoire de Belfort.

Whichever way you look at it, the Paris region, with its tightly packed population and high infection rate, is going to have to enforce more precautions than the rest of the country.

Those will probably include enforcing wearing masks on public transport. The worldwide controversy over their value continues, however, with the WHO repeating its assertion that they are not useful to people who are not infected while the French Académie de Médécine has called for them to be made obligatory in all public spaces as from now.

In any case, it will be back to business as almost usual on 11 May. Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire wants all shops to reopen, but not bars and restaurants. On the other hand, there might be regional disparities, he says.

National health boss Jérôme Salomon says that social distancing and other precautions will be with us “for a long time”.

Some 61,700 lives have been saved by France’s lockdown, according to a study published yesterday. The health service, especially in Ile de France and the Grand Est, would have been swamped, with 100,000 intensive care beds needed, it estimates.

The report in Le Monde prompted one grumpy early-riser to denounce the publication as “propaganda and disinformation”. Not being under lockdown is “not a synonym for an orgy or a Covid party”, the commenter said, pointing out that the death toll was not nearly that high in countries that have not instituted lockdown.

But there are other variables, notably the extent of testing in Asian countries that were better prepared than Europe. And, as Le Monde points out, the recent rise in the death toll in New York, which was slow to enforce lockdown, and in Sweden, where it has not been implemented, show that the measure “has saved numerous lives”.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 21,344, 544 in the past 24 hours. 29,741 people are in hospital, down 365, 5,218 in intensive care, down 215. 40,657 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 37 – Covid-19 infection rate down in France but herd immunity is far off

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Lockdown has slashed the rate of Covid-19 infection in France. That’s the good news. The bad news is that herd immunity is therefore a distant dream and a second wave of infections is pretty likely.

The number of people infected by someone who has contracted the virus has fallen from 3.3 to 0.5 since lockdown was declared, according to a study by researchers from the very authoritative Institut Pasteur, the national health authority and the medical research institute, Inserm.

The number of people admitted to intensive care fell from 700 a day when lockdown began to no more than 200 by 14 April. That means there should be between 1,370 and 1,900 intensive-care patients on 11 May, when the confinement is to be relaxed, compared to 5,433 today.

But confinement has also meant fewer overall cases, so fewer people immunised.

The researchers estimate that 3.7 million people living in France will have come in contact with the virus by 11 May. That sounds like a lot but it’s only 5.7% of the population. Scientists believe that 70% of the population need to have been infected to attain herd immunity.

Even in the worst-hit parts of the country, Ile de France and the Grand Est, the proportion infected are only 12.3% and 11.8% respectively.

On seeing the headline, I hoped the researchers had based their estimates on the official figures of the infection rate, which are complete nonsense due to the failure to carry out widespread testing.

Unfortunately, they’re really serious scientists, so they were much more methodical than that.

They based their estimates on the number of deaths in France so far, compared to the ratio of deaths to infection aboard the cruise ship Diamond-Princess, which was placed in quarantine off Japan. Given that all the passengers were tested, the figures should be reliable after being adjusted for variables, notable age.

The study finds that you have a 0.53% chance of dying if you catch Covid-19, which confirms findings of 0.5-0.7% in China. As we already know, there are great variations according to age – there’s only a 0.001% chance of dying if you’re under 18 but an 8.3% chance if your over 80 – and some according to gender, men being more likely to die than women.

The researchers also estimate that only 2.6% of people who catch the virus end up in hospital – lower than an estimate of 4.5% based on Chinese figures – and 18.2% of them have to be placed in intensive care.

So a second wave is very likely, either soon after lockdown ends if people are not as careful as they are now, or in the autumn, if the change in the weather and the arrival of other flu strains gives a new lease of life to Covid-19.

“Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown,” is the researchers understated comment.

On the other hand, checking the spread of the virus has given scientists time to research possible cures and look for a vaccine.

But, according to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, a vaccine is unlikely to be developed during the course of this year. So we have many anxious months ahead of us.

France’s Covid-19 death toll is now officially 20,796, with 531 people dying in the past 24 hours. 30,106 people are in hospital, down 478, and 5,433 in intensive care, down 250. 39,181 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,772 over the last 24 hours.

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Coronavirus diary day 36 – Will the virus change politics forever?

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An opinion poll shows growing dissatisfaction with the French government’s handling of the Coronavirus epidemic and divisions have opened up in Macron’s party. Will the crisis shatter preconceived ideas or reinforce them?

San Gennaro frees Naples from the plague, Lucao Giordano

Shortly before the virus hit us, I visited the Luca Giordano exhibition at Paris’s Petit Palais museum.

By eerie coincidence, some of the works on show were inspired by the plague outbreak in Naples in 1656.

One, by Micco Spadaro, is a gruesome portrayal of the devastation it caused. Sufferers are confined to a square, where they drop dead on the ground. Workers – one account says they were “Turks or galley slaves” – remove the bodies.

The Plague in Naples on the Piazza Mercatello, Domenico Gargiulo known as Micco Spadaro

Giordano’s painting is a thank you to the city’s patron saint, San Gennaro. You might think that the saint did not fufil his contractual obligations, given that he failed to prevent the deaths of 250,000 of the city’s 450,000 population and 50-60% of the inhabitants of what was then an independent kingdom.

But that’s not the way the church fathers viewed his performance. They told the faithful he was responsible for ending the epidemic, although Martinus Ludheim, a doctor from Bavaria who was visiting the city, seems to have had something to do with it. Giordano’s picture is entitled San Gennaro frees Naples from the plague.

We’ll never know if the loss of loved ones undermined any of the survivors’ faith in the saint or in an all-loving god. If you had made it through the epidemic, you didn’t want to end up being burnt at the stake for heresy. But ceremonies to thank the saint for deliverance seem to have been well attended and the Catholic religion has been pretty well-ensconced in the city in the intervening centuries.

Will the Coronavirus epidemic shake our certainties?

In a sense, it already has. Governments who worshipped at the altar of budgetary rigour have turned to epidemo-Keynesianism.

A new French opinion poll shows 85% of respondents want more to be spent on the health service, something the Macron government failed to do before the virus hit. It will be difficult to return to austerity in any form, whatever the pressure to pay for the present public largesse.

The Ipsos poll shows 58% dissatisfied with the way the crisis has been handled, up from 46% a month ago, while 45% say they are angry about the situation.

There is overwhelming support for the lockdown, at 77%. So the main bone of contention would not seem to be disciplined solidarity but the lack of masks and tests and the government’s U-turns on those questions.

Of course, opinion polls have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as several election and referendum results have shown, and the public mood will undoubtedly change when the epidemic finally ends.

Meanwhile, divisions have opened up in Macron’s party, La République en Marche. In the light of the crisis, some MPs who deserted the Socialist Party at the last election are calling for “social-Macronism”, which might involve more money for the health service, restraint of dividend payments and redistribution of profits to the low-paid.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 20,265, up 547 in 24 hours. 30,584 people are in hospital, down 26, and 5,638 are in intensive care, down 61. 37,409 patients have been discharged, 831 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 35 – Cheese mountain looms, no return to normal ‘for a long time’

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We’re swimming in milk. It’s spring, the cows are calving, making them superproductive milk-wise. But no markets, no restaurants and exports are down.

So – shock! horror! – the rules for some appellation contrôlée (AOC) cheeses are being relaxed. This is so significant that it must be done through a decree, published in the government’s imposingly named Journal officiel.

Some blue-cheese makers can keep their milk for longer before starting the process and can stock their product at -5°C, instead of 0°C.

The rules for stocking Comté, from the Jura, and saint-nectaire, from Auvergne, have also been relaxed.

Not exactly a revolution. Let’s hope it helps. And doesn’t have too much effect on the quality of the cheese, especially comté.

Having quoted Général de Gaulle on the number of cheeses in France, I decided to check out how many there actually are.

Now I’m confused.

It turns out that there isn’t even agreement on the number the general cited, let alone on how many cheeses are actually produced. Estimates vary widely. Maybe 1,200, maybe 1,800. In any case there are only 45 cheeses that have the status of AOC, nowadays known as AOP, which is the EU designation, and six Label rouge, which is another EU guarantee of a certain quality.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe held a press conference about how lockdown would end yesterday.

We’re working on it, was the message. Oh, and “things won’t get back to normal for a long time”.

A vaccine will probably not be developed this year, herd immunity is not for tomorrow and there is no proven treatment, he said, so “we will have to learn to live with the virus”.

A lot of tests must be carried out – notice a change in the message here? – and infected people must be placed in isolation.

Rules about visiting your elderly relatives in care will be relaxed, the schools will reopen, although classes may be staggered, and a target of producing 17 million masks a week has been set. It may be declared obligatory to wear them in public transport.

The second round of council elections, at one point planned for 21 June, will certainly take place after the summer. Well, we were all on the edges of our seats about that!

The prime minister gave the population – les Français, to French officialdom and media who kindly expunge us foreigners from the record – pretty good marks for the observation of the lockdown. There has been a huge fall in the number of times people leave home. The police have checked people’s right to be out 13.5 million times and only 800,000 cases of people flouting the ban have been registered.

France’s Covid-19 death toll is now officially 19,718, up 395 in 24 hours. 30,610 people are in hospital, down but only by 29, and 5,744 are in intensive care, down 89. 35,578 people have been discharged from hospital, 595 of them yesterday. On previous weekends the figures have been a bit inaccurate and adjusted during the week.

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Coronavirus diary day 34 – Why hasn’t Europe learnt from Asia’s fight against the virus?

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The chestnuts are in blossom along the banks of the Marne. But a poster tells us we can’t get to close. We aren’t allowed to walk along the riverbank, thanks to a decree by the local préfet that has also closed all parks and gardens.

There are several levels of paths along the river, however. And some people have to walk along the highest level to reach their homes. Apparently, it was closed off earlier in the week but it isn’t any more.

The prefecture seems to have been seized by an access of liberalism in the last couple of days. It has lifted the ban on jogging during the daytime, except for towns that border on the Bois de Vincennes.

So, for unexplained reasons, the poor residents of Joinville-le-Pont, Fontenay-sous-Bois and other such desirable addresses can’t take their exercise between the hours of 10.00am and 7.00pm, while we Campinois can. I’m not gloating, really.

France comes 19th in the league table of Covid-19 testing, lower even than the US but, surprise! surprise!, higher than the UK.

It’s one thing that the country was poorly prepared so far as supplies of both tests and masks were concerned. That’s in part the fault of previous governments. It’s another that the Macronites misled the public about their value so as to cover up these failings.

And there seems to have been a sort of post-colonial arrogance in Europe’s failure to learn from the Asian experience, not to mention the man one US left-winger has dubbed “the raging id of US imperialism”.

Will they have learnt from South Korea, Taiwan and, for that matter, China before the second wave, if it comes, or the next epidemic, which appears certain to take place thanks to our continuing light-minded disruption of nature?

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 19,323, of which 642 in the last 24 hours. 30,639 people are in hospital, down for the fourth day running, by 551, while admissions to intensive care were also down, for the 10th day, by 194, to 5,833. 35,983 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,563 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 33 – Discrimination and the virus

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Lockdown has dealt a serious blow to the epidemic, French health boss Jérôme Salomon said yesterday, as he announced three successive days of decline in the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 and the ninth daily fall in the number in intensive care.

Yesterday’s death toll was 761, however, slightly up on the previous day. So the message is no let-up yet.

When it comes to phasing out lockdown, Macron says he “does not want any discrimination” against older or more vulnerable people.

He was reacting to the words of an expert, Professor Jean-François Delfraissy, who told a Senate hearing that lockdown should continue for the vulnerable and “people of a certain age – 65 or 70 years old”.

Everything here is confusing. Does the professor mean people over 65 or those over 70? Can’t he make his mind up and, if so, why not?

And what does Macron mean by “discrimination”?

When announcing plans for “déconfinement”, he said himself it would be phased and seemed to imply that restrictions would remain in place for vulnerable people. Speaking as someone at the lower end of the professor’s age category, that seems advisable to me. I shall continue to be careful until I’m sure the damn virus has gone away.

We seem to have forgotten the meaning of the word “discrimination”. It doesn’t have to be bad. A discriminating museum director will assemble a good collection, a discriminating doctor will choose the right treatment for patients. Racism, sexism and other discriminations based on prejudice are unjust. Rules that target those at risk for their own protection are not.

Mayors can’t introduce additional anti-virus rules on top of those put in place by the government, the country’s top court has ruled, although it made an exception for “pressing reasons arising from local circumstances”.

The French Human Rights League had appealed to the Conseil d’état against an order by the mayor of Sceaux, a town just outside Paris, obliging all residents to wear masks.

Several mayors have declared night-time curfews, with Christian Estrosi, the hard-right mayor of Nice, tightening conditions in some deprived areas after fighting broke out one weekend. I don’t know if these decisions were ever challenged.

The curfew in Nice was later extended to the whole region by the préfet, who is a representative of the national government and so not covered by the Conseil d’état’s ruling.

The famous Dr Fauci, the US’s Jérôme Salamon, said a few days ago we should never go back to shaking hands, a practice he claims leads to the spread of flu and other infections.

This led to a heated exchange on one American Facebook account I follow, some people declaring they have always hated the whole idea.

Twenty-six years ago I moved from the UK, where casual physical contact is, or at least used to be, practically regarded as an act of terrorism, to France, where the concept of personal space is radically different, as anyone walking down a Paris street soon discovers.

Here people shake hands and even kiss as a casual greeting – yes, even the men! Arriving at work can become a 10-minute ceremony. And knowing how many times to faire la bise is a real challenge. It can change according to region and, as far as I can tell, age and racial/cultural origin.

It all seemed very exotic at first but I have come to feel that the physical contact breaks a psychological barrier and establishes a certain mutual confidence, whether justified or not. I believe that shaking hands originally started as a way to prove you weren’t carrying a sword or dagger, which is always nice to know, especially in the workplace.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 18,681. 31,190 people are in hospital due to the virus, a fall of 115 in 24 hours, while 6,027 are in intensive care, down 221. 34,420 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,608 yesterday.

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