In surrealist Coronavirus news, a zebra was spotted cantering along a road in Champigny last night. It was accompanied by two horses.

They had escaped from a circus that has pitched its tents by a huge commercial centre just outside the town, it turned out.

“It was heading for the fort at cracking pace,” reported Murielle Roux, who posted a video of the equine dash for freedom and on Facebook. “I called the police and they said that they had caught it. Ouf!”

So my town has an exotic version of those pictures of ducks waddling though Paris and coyotes by the Golden Gate bridge, which have led us all to speculate that a fall in pollution has allowed nature to reclaim the cities.

Not so, some spoilsport scientist has told Le Monde. They were there already but now we can see them, thanks to the lack of traffic.

Liliane Marchais, the widow of long-time Communist Party chief Georges Marchais, died on Wednesday in a care home in Bry-sur-Marne. She was 84.

The couple lived in Champigny and Fidel Castro visited the town to have dinner with them in 1995.

Fabienne Sintes, a much-travelled reporter who presents a broadcast on France Inter radio, told me once that she nearly ran Marchais over once, while learning to drive in Champigny. That would have been quite a headline, even if she had only just started her glorious career at the time.

A local doctor, Ali Djemoui, who practiced in Bois l’Abbé, has died, aged 59.

Good news on the mask front. The département is to buy 1.5 million and start distributing 150,000 per week on 27 April.

Some towns have also bought their own supplies.

As for the lockdown, Macron’s advisers have told the media he is going to extend it to at least 15 May, if not to the end of the month.

His speech to the nation tomorrow evening is going to be “Churchillian”, they say. In the “blood, sweat and tears” sense, one assumes, not the imperialist raving.

The Covid-19 death toll in France now stands officially at 13,832, up 635 in 24 hours. 31,320 people are in hospital, up 53, and 6,883 are in intensive care, down 121. 26,391 people have been discharged from hospital, cured.

I miss the markets. On a normal Saturday I would either be taking the bus down the road to Joinville-le-Pont or trailing my wheely-basket over the bridge to Champignol, by the RER station. Both areas are a bit posher than Champigny, so higher quality produce, especially at Joinville.

On Sundays I can go to Champigny market, two minutes away on what is possibly the last Place Lénine left in France, or walk along the river bank to a glorious covered market in Varenne.

Champigny market is also open on Tuesdays and Fridays and Champignol on Wednesday.

Except they’re not due to lockdown.

I don’t actually go to a market every day in normal times but I’m a frequent visitor, even on days when I don’t buy very much. I love the bustle. The traders, most of them at least, being friendly, whether by nature or commercial calculation. The banter with the clients. The feast for the eyes of fruit, veg, fish, charcuterie …

In multiracial Champigny there’s a multicultural mix both in customers – Portuguese, Turks, Maghrebins, sub-Saharan Africans, me – and goods on offer – chorizo, pastel de nata, börek, pain de semoule, groundnuts, plantains and stuff I don’t recognise, without forgetting a splendid selection of offal.

Now we queue, two metres apart, across the Place Lénine where the market-traders should be declaiming and the shoppers shuffling, to be admitted to Monoprix one at a time.

Inside we douse our hands with cleanser and rush around the aisles as quickly as we can, silently cursing our fellow shoppers for coming too close.

Maybe I’m not very discriminating when it comes to vegetables, but I don’t find their offer too bad in that department, apart from the mysterious absence of mushrooms (I know, not technically a vegetable).

But the fruit is bland. And the meat! I bought a chicken and you could break its bones just by looking at them. It may have been organic but it hadn’t done much walking. That tells in the texture, spongy, and the taste – let’s just say you need to make full use of the spice cupboard.

And where do they hide the eggs? I know they exist because the man in front of me at the checkout had some. But I searched and searched and couldn’t find them.

We’re not starving, so I suppose this is a bit of a whinge. But I miss meat and fruit with flavour, a choice of radish, olives not in jars, and, above all, good cheese. It’s there on the shelves – Comté, Brie, brebis, chèvre … but I’m not sure I could tell the difference on a blind tasting. On the markets I have a choice of jovial cheesemongers ready to serve a generous selection of those 258 varieties de Gaulle famously remarked on.

Worrying news from South Korea, where they’ve done a famously good job of fighting the virus thanks to methodical testing.

Some 51 patients who tested positive, shortly after testing negative and declared cured. The same thing is reported to have happened in China and Japan.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 13,197, about a third of them in care homes. The number of people in intensive care has gone down for the second day running, by 62 to 7,004, but the number of hospital admissions continues to rise, by 500 to 31,267. There are 90,676 recorded cases, an underestimate as everyone admits.

France’s lockdown is to be extended, to nobody’s surprise.

The president is to tell us how long we must remain in our homes on Monday when he will make his third televised address since the start of the crisis.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has sent a letter outlining proposals on how to handle a phased end of lockdown to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.

At more than 20,000 inhabitants per km², Paris is the most densely populated city outside Asia. Many residents live in small flats and Madame la Maire is especially worried about people who can’t effectively self-isolate from the people they live with if they become infected.

She calls for widespread targeted testing and certificate of immunity for people who have recovered, so that they can be exempted from some lockdown requirements. I hope people are thinking this through, since I believe it is not yet clear how long immunity can last.

Hidalgo, who would clearly like to be France’s first female president, joins a number of politicians who have called for an inquiry into the government’s handling of the epidemic and is critical of the lack of protective material.

The scandalous mask shortage surely has lessons for all. Not only because of the cost-cutting mentality that meant that stocks built up after previous epidemics were run down but also because of the global division of labour that means Europe and the US are fighting on the tarmac to buy masks and other supplies from China when they could have been produced here.

Globalisation has not only devastated the environment and helped spread the virus, it has also made the world economy dependent on supply lines that are fatally disrupted by this kind of crisis. And it seems there will be more such crises.

Plasma may save lives. Since Tuesday French medics have been running a clinical trial to see if transfusions of blood from cured patients can save severely ill patients.

Blood has been taken from 200 people who have recovered and is being given to 30 of the group of 60 patients, Le Monde reports. The other 30 are being given a placebo, which of course is standard practice.

The first results won’t be available for two to three weeks, unfortunately.

Similar tests are taking place in the US, where the doctor in charge says that each donation of blood could save three or four lives.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 10,869 but this is an underestimate because a “technical problem” has prevented the number of deaths in care homes being updated today. There are 82,048 confirmed cases (also an underestimate because of the lack of testing) 30,375 people hospitalised, up 348 in 24 hours, and 7,148 in intensive care, an increase of only 17. 21,254 people have been discharged from hospital.

Our neighbour Marianne was cutting forsythia at her end of the courtyard when I put my head outside the door yesterday. She said it was to prevent it blocking another neighbour’s windows. I begged her not to throw the branches away, so there is a pile of gold on the top of the steps in front of her house.

“I’ve lost a friend,” she told me. “An anarchist comrade. One of the ones I made video about.” Marianne is an anarchist, though not a politically active one, and she runs Video-sur-Marne, which collects short films about the area by her and other people.

“He was only 30 and had been healthy,” she said. “It looks like they didn’t take the symptoms seriously enough. He started having difficulty breathing and within four hours he was dead.”

Marianne has been discussing with a friend whether the epidemic will change people’s attitudes for the good.

She doesn’t think so. Neither does her friend. And they find the evening applause sessions for health workers “indecent”.

Raphaël, the man from the council who phones every day to check that Mum is alright, is more optimistic. The crisis is a lesson in solidarity, he said when we chatted yesterday.

He has to phone about 10 elderly people every day, except weekends. Staying inside is getting him down a bit, he says – he appears to be a fairly sporty type. “But I get out to deliver groceries to some of the old folk who can’t get outside themselves.”

To the chemist, to pick up Mum’s prescription. They are all wearing face masks and gloves and work behind plexiglass screens.

I asked the young woman who served me how she found wearing a mask on all day.

“It’s not great,” she said. “There’s a mark on our faces when we get home and our eyes are sore and red.”

The weekend’s improvement has not lasted, Le Monde reports. The number of deaths in the last 24 hours rose again to 605, the highest yet.

The number of hospitalisations and admissions to intensive care has also risen. But they are not as high as they were on Friday, or throughout last week when they were over 1,000 per day.

France’s Covid-19 death rate now officially stands at 8,911. 29,722 people have been hospitalised, 7,072 are in intensive care. There are 74,390 confirmed cases (unquestionably an underestimate) and 17,250 people have been discharged from hospital.

France’s poorest département, Seine Saint Denis, has seen a leap in the number of deaths from Covid-19 – up 63% between 21-27 March.

It is not the worst hit, that’s the eastern département of Haut Rhin, but the virus is taking off at an alarming rate in this working-class area north of Paris, Le Figaro reports.

Local officials say there are fewer intensive care beds than in neighbouring areas and local people have less access to good quality health care. And housing conditions – many large families living in confined spaces, migrant workers’ hostels, slums and shanty towns – also appear to contribute to the spread.

There’s another key factor, according to Gwenaëlle Ferré who runs a health centre in the area. Many residents of Seine Saint Denis work in those poorly paid and little-appreciated jobs, which have now turned out to be indispensable. They work in delivery or are carers in old people’s homes or for local councils and are thus at high risk of exposure to the virus.

In Seine Saint Denis there have been 263 deaths (1.8 per 1,000), 1,310 people hospitalised, 228 in intensive care and 503 cured.

The département I live in, Val de Marne, which also includes a number of working-class areas, has seen 280 deaths (2.0 per 1,000). There are 1,651 people hospitalised, 291 in intensive care and 641 people cured.

The city of Paris has seen 548 deaths (2.6 per 1,000), 2,999 hospitalisations, 809 in intensive care and 1,212 cured.

Tests have started in Paris and elsewhere to see whether blood transfusions from cured patients can help seriously ill patients.

Similar tests have taken place in China and the US.

Researchers are also testing vaccination with an anti-TB drug, BCG.

Only 8% of serious Covid-19 cases and 1% of those who have died in France are below 45 years old, while 22% of serious cases and 73% of deaths are over 75 years old.

Gender is also a key factor – 74% of serious cases in intensive care are men, as are 59% of those who have died. This has yet to be explained.

Saturday’s Covid-19 death toll in France was 441, down from 588 on Friday, the worst day so far. That brings the total recorded death toll to 7,560, with 64,338 serious cases recorded, 6,800 people I intensive care.

Paris’s top cop has told us that if we catch Covid-19 it’s all our own fault for not listening to the wise counsels of the government.

In a video filmed on Friday, Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, a man who has the permanent look of someone who has just sucked on a lemon and acts accordingly, declared that “ … the people who are in hospital, who are in intensive care, are the people who didn’t respect the lockdown when it began”.

He was forced to apologise after doctors pointed out that some patients certainly fell ill before the government finally got round to ordering the lockdown – after failing to call off the first round of council elections, if you remember – and that many others are residents of old people’s homes or workers whose jobs are deemed essential, doctors and nurses for example.

I suppose one might become a bit impatient with people who break the confinement rule if one had spent one’s Friday stopping people who had taken it into their heads to go off on a spring break, as Lallement and his troops did.

But the prefect has form. Last year he caused uproar when he told Yellow Vest protesters “We are not in the same camp.” Indeed, the “centrist” Macron government seems to have picked him because he is so nasty.

There are 180,000 cops on the streets to stop people taking an Easter holiday this weekend.

I suppose Lallement could argue that it’s tough love, which is my excuse for nagging my 95-year-old mother continuously about the anti-virus precautions.

Sometimes she remembers that she’s supposed to wash her hands regularly, sometimes that she should cough or sneeze into a tissue or her elbow, although the latter is judged impossible.

But remembering the rules and observing them are two different things and, given that she frequently forgets about the pandemic’s existence, she clearly thinks that I have become a hygiene fanatic just to annoy her.  

The most difficult rule is not touching your face. We all have difficulty observing that one but for her it is particularly difficult, given her habit of taking her false teeth out and wiping them during the course of a meal.

The authorisation form you have to fill in to leave your home will be available to download on your phone as from Monday.

France’s Covid-19 recorded death toll stands at 8,500. There are 63,633 confirmed cases, 6,662 people are in intensive care and 14,000 have been discharged from hospital.