All posts by Tony Cross

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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Coronavirus diary day 32 – Good news, bad news and municipal largesse

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Lockdown in France enters its second month today. It seems to be bearing modest fruits, with admissions to hospital falling for the second day running and the number of people in intensive care falling for the eighth.

The official death toll continues to rise, however, as does the number of recorded cases, which is, of course, an underestimate.

Nevertheless, it’s not looking good for herd immunity, if a report from Wuhan is to be believed.

A hospital there found that only 2.4% of its employees and 2-3% of discharged patients have developed antibodies, according to the Wall Street Journal, leaving its director, Wang Xinghuan, to conclude that a vaccine is our only hope.

Everybody’s slagging off China these days, which will no doubt send the ranting diplomat in the Paris embassy into a frenzy of what-aboutery.

Trump has of course been lashing out for some time and, inevitably, the British have echoed the American leader. Now Macron has told the Financial Times that it is “naïve” to suggest China had dealt better with the crisis.

Things have “happened that we don’t know about”, he added darkly.

Today the Chinese admitted that reporting of the number of deaths in Wuhan has been delayed and inaccurate and added 1,290 to the death toll there.

But that only takes the total to 4,632 out of a population 1,439,323,776, which is difficult to believe. We know that the People’s Republic’s bureaucratic authoritarian culture led local officials to harass doctors who blew the whistle at the beginning. So there is probably underreporting.

But, when they did act, the Chinese acted decisively and the country seems to have turned the corner now.

In the US 32,916 people have now died, out of a population of 330,584,100; in Italy 22,170 out of 60,480,630; in Spain 19,315 out of 46,751,140; in the UK 13,759 out of 67,813,940; and in France 17,920 out of 65,244,420.

There is a considerable disparity, even if the Chinese figures are hugely underestimated.

More on municipal communism. Raphaël, the Champigny-sur-Marne council employee who phones to check on Mum’s well-being every weekday delivered two bags full of fruit and veg to our door yesterday.

The council is distributing healthy food to people in financial difficulty and to those who should not be going out too much during lockdown.

We are both of an age to be at relatively high risk from the virus, so we presumably fall into the second category.

We can’t claim to be in financial difficulty, as our neighbour Marianne pointed out. I gave her some bananas, apples and potatoes. That shut her up.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 17,920. 31,305 people are in hospital, down 474 in 24 hours, and  6,248 are in intensive care, down 209. 32,812 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 31 – Amazon France’s closure shows why you need unions

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Amazon has closed its warehouses in France for at least five days after a court ordered it to limit its trade to strict essentials because of Coronavirus safety fears. The case was brought by a militant union that said the company was failing to protect its workers from the virus.

The company appealed against the court’s ruling but then took even more drastic action – total closure. At first it announced closure for five days to review anti-virus measures, which it earlier insisted were adequate. But on Thursday French CEO Frédéric Duval told RTL radio he did not know when the sites would reopen.

The announcements have been accompanied by petulant complaints about the “major consequences” of “the union action that led to this result” on customers and employees, while delicately refraining to mention its effect on the company’s profits.

Amazon’s employees – there are almost 10,000 in France – will remain on full pay during the closure.

The case was taken to court by the Sud trade union, which accused the company of “carrying on as normal” despite the virus.

By contrast, in the US Amazon has fired at least three employees who have spoken out on employee safety during the epidemic.

Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa were dismissed on the grounds that they had previously broken the company’s internal regulations with public criticism of its stance on climate change.

“We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fox News via email in a magnificent example of doublespeak.

Earlier, Christian Smalls was shown the door for violating “several terms of his employment”.

The French case also shows the value of France’s labour law, a regular target of free-market fanatics.

The French government has announced supplementary payments worth a total of a billion euros for the country’s four million poorest households.

Healthworkers in the worst-hit départements are to receive a bonus of 1,500 euros and the rest will be paid an extra 500 euros.

Public-sector employees who are still working are to receive a bonus of up to 1,000 euros.

It’s a shame the government didn’t listen to healthworkers when they were protesting and taking strike action over low pay and difficult working conditions last year.

Hospital admissions have gone down for the first time since the start of the epidemic. The number of people in intensive care has been falling for several days. The death toll continues to rise, however.

France’s Covid-19 death toll is now officially 17,167, up 1,438 in 24 hours. 31,779 people are in hospital, down 513, and 6,457 are in intensive care, down 273. 30,995 people have been discharged from hospital, 2,190 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 30 – Macron’s plan to help Africa and a delicate matter concerning China

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I’m honour-bound to mention the French president’s interview with my former employer, RFI. Africa being RFI’s beat, Emmanuel Macron told Christophe Boisbouvier that a moratorium should be declared on African countries’ debts to help them face up to Coronavirus.

The sum total of those debts has risen from 35% of GDP in 2012 to 90% today, he pointed out. It now stands at 365 billion dollars.

“Every year a third of what Africa exports in trade goes to service its debt,” Macron said. “That’s mad!”

The French president wants a “massive” cancellation of the debt. In the short term, he hopes that the G20 will decide on Wednesday evening that the interest should no longer be paid. He has to convince the Chinese, who hold 40% of Africa’s debt, as well as Russia, the Gulf states and private lenders.

The controversial Professor Didier Raoult also came up. He claims that the low level of Coronavirus infection in Africa at present is due to the high level of consumption of anti-malarial drugs, like hyrdoxochloroquine, which he is using along with azithromycine at his Marseille laboratory to combat Covid-19.

Raoult was apparently born in Senegal. “In Africa we all guzzled chloroquine when we were kids,” he has said.

Macron, who visited the professor for three hours last week, was cautious, given lack of conclusive proof that the treatment Raoult is advocating works and the doubts of many of his colleagues.

Raoult is a “great scientist” but his treatment has to be properly tested, Macron said. “It’s not a question of belief, it’s a question of science.”

As well as having interviewed pretty much anybody who is anybody in Africa, Boisbou is becoming a dab hand at interviewing French presidents. He interviewed Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande. A charming, “well brought-up” gentleman, he told me.

China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, was “summoned” by Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian yesterday for a telling-off about a bizarre rant on the Chinese embassy’s website. The interview actually took place by phone, what with lockdown and all.

Needled by criticisms of the People’s Republic handling of the virus, the post lays into “media who consider themselves to be paragons of impartiality and objectivity, and experts and politicians of certain Western countries more concerned with slandering, stigmatising and attacking China than with thinking about how to contain the epidemic in their own countries and in the rest of the world”.

Pointing to various blunders in the handling of the virus in Europe and the US, the anonymous diplomat declares “I haven’t seen many reports or in-depth investigations in the big Western media revealing these facts.”

As it happens, the source for all these assertions seems to be the Western media.

One allegation is definitely not from that source, though. Unhappy about a letter signed by 80 French MPs calling for Taiwan to be allowed to join the WHO, the author accuses the Taiwanese authorities of racially insulting WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

With a flourish the author quotes a “cyber-writer” comparing “certain Western political and cultural elites” with the cuttlefish, which “when it is in danger, squirts its ink to blacken the water and takes advantage to flee”. A fair criticism – but not just of the West.

The French thought long and hard before reprimanding Lu, according to Le Monde. They don’t want a diplomatic spat to stop delivery of the millions of masks the country has ordered. And there’s also the African debt question to negotiate.

In 1968 a flu epidemic cost a million lives, the Swiss paper Le Temps points out. “Spanish flu” killed 20-40 million in 1918-20. Another two million died of “Asian flu” in 1957.

The world shrugged off these deaths, it says, comparing that reaction to today’s response to the Coronavirus.

“Back then people over 65 were considered to have escaped natural mortality,” medical historian Bernardino Fantini tells the paper. “While today even the deaths of the elderly are considered a scandal.”

By that reckoning, both my 95-year-old mother and I are dead people on leave, which is not very comforting.

We will continue to do our best to avoid catching the virus, nevertheless.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 15,729, up 762 in 24 hours. 32,292 people are in hospital, a rise of 179, and 6,730 are in intensive care, down 91. 28,805 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 29 – Macron does humble but misleads over virus testing

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Emmanuel Macron put on his humble hat in his third television address to the nation last night. For a man whose default mode is technocratic arrogance that must have been difficult.

In a sober speech described by one editorialist as “cuddle-therapy”, the president said that lockdown should be relaxed, though not completely wound up, on 11 May.

He paid tribute to key workers, many of whom are the sort of people he has previously dismissed as not having “succeeded” in life, called for humility all round, admitted “we” were not sufficiently prepared for the crisis, and pointed out that the virus is increasing inequality.

“We must be able to depart from the beaten path, from ideologies, reinvent ourselves,” he said, adding. “And me first of all.”

That would be very welcome. But it is pretty vague. Macron, like all other world leaders, has been obliged to renounce his worship of the free market during the crisis. Will he return to capitalist form once it shows signs of easing off?

Will society become more egalitarian?

Will those workers who have proved they are indispensable be paid what they’re worth or will they just have to be satisfied with applause at 8.00pm?

Macron raised the “possibility of planning carbon sobriety”. This crisis is an opportunity to avert even greater devastation by kicking the carbon habit. But will governments resist the temptation to go for growth by any means possible once workers are back at their posts?

The phased ending of the lockdown, which Interior Minister Christophe Castaner has already said is a target not a certainty, seems above all aimed at getting more people back to work, an understandable but risky strategy.

And there was one case of economy with the truth in the president’s address. Macron said that testing the whole population “would make no sense”.

Given that many infected people show no symptoms, that’s patently untrue. Widespread testing has been a key measure in those countries that have been most successful in containing the virus.

This is a repetition of the government’s disinformation about wearing masks. If there aren’t enough, just tell us. Don’t make out it wouldn’t be a good thing to test far more people than is currently planned.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now stands at 15,167, up 574 in the last 24 hours. 32,113 people are in hospital, 287 admitted yesterday. 6,281 patients are in intensive care, down 24. 27,718 have been discharged from hospital, 532 of them yesterday.

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