The US government has denied reports that its representatives bought millions of face masks as they were about to be flown to France, paying cash on the airport runway.

The presidents of three French regional councils, including Valérie Pécresse who heads Ile de France, say that Americans bought consignments of masks at Chinese airports for up to four times as much just as the planes were about to be loaded.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he is “very worried” by a report that a cargo destined for Quebec arrived substantially lighter than expected allegedly after the same trick was pulled off.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe denied the government has mishandled the supply of masks in a television address last night.

The evidence – a major shortage in hospitals, never mind for the rest of us – seems to contradict him.

Production was stepped up in January, he claimed, but the explosion of the epidemic in Alsace took the government by surprise.

At least there are four mask manufacturers in France, Philippe pointed out, while some countries don’t have any. And, of course, others are being imported, if the Americans don’t outbid us.

All of which, ignores the government’s misleading declarations on the value of masks – claims that they were pointless for the general public, which, it is now clear, were an attempt to make up for the shortage for frontline workers.

The Mediapart website has published a long and damning article on failures to follow up leads from concerned citizens, attempts to cover up shortages, preferential treatment for Airbus and “lies”.

Lockdown will almost certainly be extended beyond the current 15 April deadline, Philippe said.

The prime minister found it necessary to appeal to the French not to go away on seasonal holidays. “OK, it’s spring … but the virus doesn’t take a holiday.”

And there will have to be a rethink on how to organize and mark the all-important baccalauréat, the final school exam.

Very French problems.

An “ultra-modern” site is to be opened at a hospital in Créteil, not far from Champigny, by mid-April. It will be able to handle an extra 86 patients, which doesn’t seem a lot given the scale of the epidemic. Presumably they will be the most urgent ones.

In the topsy-turvy Coronavirus world, the Medef bosses’ union has called for companies in difficulty to be nationalised and the free-market-fanatical government has agreed.

But, but the ideological aberration will only be temporary. Those too-big-to-fail French companies will be handed back to their owners when the crisis is over, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has reassured them.

“It’s just a question of the state protecting companies, for a limited time, by taking a stake or possibly enacting a temporary nationalisation,” he told France24 and RFI.

I yearn to go for a walk in the woods in the spring sunshine.

I had to make do with a walk to the bakery, which takes me over the Marne, where chestnuts are beginning to regain their leaves, bushes are blossoming and birds are singing.

A Canada goose and a duck rushed to the bank when they saw me. They must wonder what’s happened to the humans who often feed them. Still, apparently it’s not a good diet for them, so they can thank the virus for a slimming course.

The death toll from Covid-19 in France’s hospitals now stands at 4,503, up 471 in 24 hours. Figures have now been announced for old people’s homes – at least 884, although officials say this is almost certainly an underestimate. There are more than 26,000 people in hospital with the virus, 6,399 in intensive care, a rise of 382 in 24 hours. More than 12,000 people have been discharged from hospital, apparently recovered.

Here’s what happens if you report severe coronavirus symptoms – high temperature, headache, breathing difficulties and extreme weakness – and you call health services in Paris now.

Ian Noble received a text from a friend in his late 50s, who lives alone in a large apartment block, his throat was sore to talk.

“He contacted the appropriate medical service whose advice was that he should stay in self-isolation, monitor his temperature, drink lots of fluids and basically sweat it out until he gets better. He should only call the severely strained emergency ambulance service for evacuation to overstretched hospital facilities if his breathing difficulties reached alarming levels.

“But how do you decide on your own what is sufficiently alarming?

“I told him not to sacrifice his life expectancy to an excessive sense of civic responsibility. By Wednesday he was feeling slightly less ill but understood he wouldn’t be in the clear until next Monday.”

The hospitals are so overstretched they are only taking the most desperate cases, although Le Monde reports that some private clinics have said that they have facilities available that are not being used.

I know of two other cases where people have been told to stay at home and wait for improvement, which, thankfully, has taken place.

None of these three people has been tested, which means that in France, as practically everywhere else, the statistics of the number of cases – even fairly severe ones – are an underestimate, probably a huge one.

My latest trip to a supermarket took me to Franprix. It’s the nearest one to me but I haven’t been there since the start of the lockdown, partly because it is small, which make social distancing difficult, and partly because in normal times heavy drinkers gather outside and go there to buy their booze.

There was indeed one poorly dressed man who appeared to be homeless and whose only purchase was several cans of beer.

The other customers were making a half-hearted attempt to keep distance between each other. Some people’s behaviour defies logic. They wear masks but don’t cover their mouths and nose with them in a confined space and they ignore the norms for distancing.

Worryingly, none of the usual staff were working. Is that because they have fallen ill?

Two men, one young, the other older, were at the tills. They were visibly on edge, especially the older one, who snapped at a customer, a delivery driver and his clearly inexperienced colleague, who was having great difficulty finding the codes for fruit and veg.

“Don’t talk me like that,” he told the driver. “I’m working till midnight, me!”

They served us from behind a plexiglass screen. The older man hasd a simple mask, the younger a helmet with a plexiglass visor attached.

More on the God question: Tariq Ali reports on Facebook that Pakistani clerics are refusing to close mosques or stop congregations.

“The PTI government [of PM Imran Khan] itself encouraged this by refusing to ban the annual gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat (a revivalist, missionary outfit that has recruited lots of top Army people, civil servants, cricketing stars, bored housewives, etc) and it took place as usual near Lahore, sparking off a number of Covid infections,” he writes. “Now the clerics are in open defiance. The government should not delay taking action since the mosques can and are becoming a breeding ground for the virus. If ever there was a time for the military to move in and seal off the mosques, this is it ….”

From Turkey comes the news that 90,000 prisoners are to be transferred to house arrest or have their sentences halved, making them eligible for parole, because of the epidemic.

Among the lucky beneficiaries are people found guilty of unpremeditated murder and participation in organised crime, although an earlier proposal to include sex offenders and domestic violence perpetrators was dropped.

The country’s jails are packed with 300,000 prisoners, partly due to the government’s enthusiasm for locking up political opponents, like former presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas, critical journalists and alleged coup plotters, some convicted on the flimsiest of evidence. These categories will stay in their cells, according to the Guardian.

The number of Covid-19 deaths in French hospitals now stands at 4,043. Figures are not yet available for deaths in retirement homes. There are 57,749 serious cases recorded, more than 6,000 of them in intensive care. There are 9,600 people hospitalised in Ile de France.

So it turns out that migrants have their uses! Faced with a shortage of labour in the market gardens of Seine et Marne, which provide much of Paris’s fruit and veg, the authorities have appealed to refugees to go and work in the fields.

Farmers had already suggested that companies might “loan” them laid-off workers.

A tweet from the Seine et Marne préfet, the top government official in the area, met a mixed response with comments like “Aren’t you beating them with truncheons any more?” and demands to know how much they would be paid.  

The work is on a voluntary basis, he replied, adding that they would be given work permits and paid the rate for the job, without giving a figure. As of yesterday, 56 had volunteered to go and dig spuds and pick fruit.

Let’s hope the racists are paying attention!

Globalisation may have contributed to the spread of the virus but now cross-border cooperation is helping fight it.

Not only has China embarked on a soft-power drive to help other countries – an effort that includes sending millions of masks to France – and Cuba sent teams of doctors to needy nations, but also hospitals in Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland have taken in seriously ill French patients.

Meanwhile, Orly airport has closed, which means less noise pollution for us in Champigny.

Whose side is God on? One reason that the Grand Est region of France is the second worst affected by the epidemic is that 2,500 evangelical Christians visited a megachurch in the city of Mulhouse in late February. That was before the government banned large gatherings. Social distancing was not observed during the prayer meetings.

A number of those present have tested positive, including one of the preachers, Samuel Peterschmitt, who is the founder’s son. At least two have died and others have spread the virus to other regions, including the French south American territory of Guyana.

In a video sermon, Pastor Thiebault Geyer has apologised with tears in his eyes for the church’s role in spreading the virus. That didn’t stop him claiming that the fact that he has not tested positive is a sign from heaven that he has “a role to play” in fighting the virus today.

France is not the only country where religious gatherings, sometimes held in defiance of bans, have helped spread the virus, nor is Christianity the only religion whose adepts have ignored scientists’ warnings.

France’s Covid-19 recorded death toll is now 3,523, a rise of 499 in 24 hours. The number of confirmed cases has risen by a record 7,657 over the same period. There are 22,800 people being treated in hospital, 5,565 of them in intensive care, a figure that has doubled over the last week. Sixty per cent of the patients are between 60 and 80 years old.

If you live with an elderly person, coughing and spluttering or other unusual sounds coming from their bedroom are worrying. But so is silence because … well, you know.

No sound from Mum’s room when I woke up this morning. I restrained the urge to check on her and was reassured within half an hour by the sounds of a sortie to the toilet. I think a scattering of lemongrass oil has calmed her cough. Please don’t tell me there are side effects.

A coward dies a thousand deaths and a worrier suffers a thousand crises but at least our anxiety spurs us to take action against its sources.

The death toll from this “unprecedented, severe, murderous” epidemic in France has now passed 3,000, as it has in the US. The description of the plague is from France’s health boss Jérôme Salomon, who reported that yesterday saw the highest rise in the number of deaths so far – 418.

It should peak in Ile de France at the end of the week, Stéphane Gaudry, a professor in medicine in Bobigny, north of Paris, told Le Monde. To date 954 people have died and 7,700 have been hospitalized in the Paris region, he says.

The national peak should have been reached on Saturday, according to earlier forecasts, but that has not happened. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, backed up by some experts, now predicts the peak at the end of this weekbut not everybody is that optimistic.

Macron is visiting a mask manufacturer today. The company has taken on extra labour and appealed to other firms to “lend” laid-off workers to help boost production. There are four mask manufacturers in France and they expect to raise weekly production from 15 million to 40 million. Millions are also being imported from China.

A lot of people seem to have masks, despite the fact that their distribution is supposed to be limited to frontline workers at the moment. Did they have them already? Did they get in early and buy up stocks? I was happy to find I already had one but I’ve used it now.

Which brings us to the read-this-and-weep moment.

In 2015 France had stocks of 285 million FFP2 masks and 20 million packs of 50 surgical masks – as many as current Health Minister Olivier Véran says we need today – plus 2,100 respirators and oxygen bottles and 11,000 sets of protective clothing and accessories.

In 2007, in the wake of the bird flu outbreak, a special unit was set up to prepare for future epidemics.

There was a right-wing government at the time and some Socialists accused it of enriching the manufacturers at the taxpayers’ expense.

And, of course, there was the continuous pressure to reduce health spending and balance the budget.

The unit’s budget was slashed from 281 million euros in 2007 to 25.8 million in 2015. It  was merged with other government departments and the stocks run down, leaving no FFP2 masks at all and 120 million surgical masks when the Covid-19 emergency erupted.

France’s Covid-19 recorded death toll now stands at 3,024. There are 45,170 confirmed cases, 21,000 being treated in hospital, 5,100 of them in intensive care.

A blind woman was begging outside the bakery this morning, right up by the door so that everyone had to pass close to her as they entered.

As we were waiting, she advanced towards the queue, squawking “S’il vous plait! S’il vous plait!” in a grating voice.

Everyone scattered. A man at the end of the queue rather pointlessly said “She’s blind,” and the woman nearest to her replied “I know but … ”, while backing away.

The woman – black and scruffily dressed, I think I’ve seen her around town – gave up asking for money, lit a cigarette and went back to her place at the door. I went to another bakery.

Coronavirus makes cowards of us all.

The hydroxcyhlorine controversy rages on. Health officials in Nouvelle Aquitaine have announced that some people who took it without a prescription have developed heart problems as a consequence.

There have been warnings of other side effects, especially for older people.

Professor Didier Raoult, the media-friendly Marseille doctor who announced the drug had “spectacular” results against Covid-19 after testing it on 24 patients, says he has been vindicated. In his latest study 65 of the 80 patients treated improved and were discharged from hospital in an average of less than five days, he says. One patient aged 74 was still in intensive care and another aged 86 died.

Some other scientists point out that the trial was not subject to the usual controls.

International tests of the drug’s use against Covid-19 are still being carried out but the French government has authorized its use under a doctor’s supervision.

Queues have formed outside the hospital where Raoult works and there has been a run on the drug, reportedly depriving some patients who were already prescribed it for other illnesses of their supply.

The professor has apparently attracted a fan club on the far right, whose adepts present him as an anti-establishment rebel whose work is being sabotaged by big pharma (although Sanofi, which is hardly an entrepreneurial insurgent, has ramped up production of its hydroxychlorine product, plaquenil).  

In fact, Raoult has spent years cultivating connections in political circles, mainly, though not exclusively, on the mainstream right. The hard-right mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, a friend since their schooldays together in Nice, has leapt to the professor’s defence on social media. Having tested positive for the virus, right-wing MP Valérie Boyer reported to him for treatment.

France’s Covid-19 recorded death toll now stands at 2,606, 292 on Saturday. There are 40,174 confirmed cases, up from 37,575, 19,354 being treated in hospital, up from 17,620, 4,592 of them in intensive care.

I know this feeling, that your dancing on the edge of disaster, that there’s danger outside, that you’re living through a moment of history, but not a good one.

It’s the feeling we had driving through Kabul to beat the curfew in 2001. It’s the feeling we had when we pulled into Baghdad and saw bullet casings lying in the streets and supermarkets being looted in 2003.

You feel both threatened and thrilled. The adrenaline is always ready to surge. That’s why many people seem to be drinking a lot – it’s not just that you’re locked in with the bottles, it’s also that the constraints of avoiding the danger authorise you to cast aside some other restraints.

Prince Charles, Boris Johnson have the virus … Jair Bolsanaro may have despite his denials. In France former right-wing minister Patrick Devedjian has died from it.

Nothing for left-wingers to crow about. Let’s leave the spite to the right.

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe says the worst is yet to come.

“The first fortnight of April will be even more difficult than the fortnight that has just passed,” he said at a press conference yesterday.

Army helicopters are flying seriously ill patients from the worst-hit areas to regions with free hospital beds. Two people have been transferred across the German border from Metz to a hospital in Essen.

In Ile de France 1,300 of the 1,500 intensive care places are already taken. There were 5,000 places nationally at the start of the outbreak and the government hopes to raise that to 14,000.

We won’t know what effect the lockdown has had until the end of next week, according to Dr Arnaud Fontanet, who also spoke at the press conference.

That’s because some people being diagnosed as ill today may have caught the virus before lockdown started, according to Health Minister Olivier Véran. The symptoms can take even longer than 14 days to appear, he said.

They are still working out how to handle the post-lockdown period.

A smell of the country wafted over Paris yesterday. You could smell it in Champigny, too.

It was the bucolic odour of ammonium nitrate, spread on the fields, and detectable because other forms of pollution are greatly reduced. A possible reason for the tickles in our throats many of us were feeling.

In the absence of traffic, a group of ducks was filmed waddling past the Comédie Française yesterday.

The Covid-19 recorded death toll in France is 2,314, up 319 on Friday. There are 17,620 people in hospital with the virus, 4,273 in intensive care, a rise of 486 in 24 hours. Since 1 March 6,624 people have been given a clean bill of health and discharged from hospital.

France’s lockdown has been extended until 15 April. But, let’s face it, it could well be longer than that and with a 95-year-old mother in the house I will have to continue being ultra-cautious as long as there’s a risk of infection.

We went through our daily reminder of the necessary precautions this morning and Mum asked, “Why all this concern about hygiene all of a sudden?”

She’d forgotten about the virus, although she did remember that she had to cough into her sleeve. Remembering is one thing, observing the rules is another, however.

I woke up at 6.50am, worrying about an itch in the throat that has lasted about two days. No temperature, no more coughing than usual. That doesn’t stop grim scenarios playing on your mind.

One of our neighbours had the same problem. It turns out that Champigny town council has set up an emergency health centre in a gym and as many as 100 doctors have volunteered to work there some of the time. Tents have been erected inside for consultations, which are strictly by appointment.

Our neighbour called the hotline and was told the problem is a “seasonal thing” – hay fever, in other words.

On a less happy note, two employees of the town’s private hospital have been arrested, alleged to have stolen respirators from emergency and offering them for sale online.

Equally incomprehensible are the people who post fake medical advice online – blow a hairdryer up your nose to kill the virus, gargle with hydrogen peroxide, the sun’s rays kill the virus. Pure malice!

Bakery visit yesterday and supermarket today. The excitement never ends!

Municipal blossom on the square opposite the mairie was a reminder that we’re spending a beautiful spring indoors, if we aren’t in our country houses.

Fortunately there is no rain, sleet or snow. I had to queue over half an hour outside Monoprix, which is conscientiously enforcing social distancing. The Chinese-run greengrocers on the opposite side of the square appears to have closed for the duration.

France is to take delivery of 600 million face masks from China over the next 14 weeks. They had difficulty finding flights to transport them at first, apparently, but the first will take off tomorrow.

China has taken the lead in helping other countries but the soft power drive has been marred by an embarassing hiccup. Test kits sent to the Czech Republic and Spain have been found to be defective. An official investigation into the Shenzhen laboratory that produced them is underway.

The Covid-19 recorded death toll in France is 1,995, up 299 on Thursday. There are 15,732 people in hospital with the virus, 3,787 in intensive care. Since 1 March 5,700 people have been given a clean bill of health and discharged from hospital.

The police are on France’s streets and they’re moving in packs.

Yesterday evening I took a stroll to the bottom of the courtyard where I live – it’s private, so I assume I can do so without a signed declaration – to see how much activity there was on the main road.

Coming up the street opposite was a squad of cops, filling the pavement, two lines deep, looking menacing in their dark blue uniforms and face masks. I scuttled back to my house just in case the courtyard isn’t private enough.

It was surprising to see how numerous they were. Is this the case everywhere or do they hunt in bigger packs in the banlieue? Are they expecting trouble? I’ve heard no reports of anything serious, although I suppose there must be some awkward customers.

More than 225,000 tickets have been issued for non-compliance with the lockdown rules.

The sighting gave me an anecdote for my phone intervention on Upfront, on KPFA radio in Berkeley. Other guests included a US journalist just back from Iran, where right-wing fanatics have defied closure of religious sites, and a young American woman locked down in Varanasi, where foreigners find themselves blamed for bringing the virus.

A TGV high-speed train was adapted earlier in the week as part of an operation to move patients out of the worst-hit regions – Ile de France (around Paris) and the Grand Est (Alsace, the Vosges, Lorraine) – to areas where the hospitals are not so overburdened.

There have also been three airlifts and there will be a fourth today, from Mulhouse, in the east, to Bordeaux.

Over a million people left the Paris region between 13 and 20 March. That’s 17% of the population.

The statistics are an estimate based on Orange tracking people’s mobile phones, which is a bit spooky.

Apparently, they were leaving Paris’s posher arrondissements in droves on the day before lockdown and some blocks of flats are as empty as they are during the summer holidays.

The population of the Ile de Ré, a popular place to have a holiday home in Brittany, has risen 30%.

Now we learn that this was a bad thing to do, spreading the virus to areas that had not been hit, although there was non official warning against it, so far as I know.

I must confess that if I had that country house I want to buy in the Jura and had no symptoms, I would probably have gone to it without thinking of the implications. It’s what people do in times of plague, if they can. I mean, The Decameron, right?

Parisians are not that popular in the rest of France at the best of times. They’re even less popular now.

Author Leïla Slimani’s lyrical lockdown diary, written in her country house, has aroused some indignation among city-dwellers stuck in their less-than-capacious apartments.

In Russia they recommended people go to their dachas, so there’s a cultural difference, right there, eh?

How tragic that confinement has made it necessary to set up a domestic violence alert system in pharmacies.

The prefect of the Aisne, north-west of Paris, this week went so far as to ban the sale of alcohol in an effort to limit violence in the home.

His name being Ziad Khoury, right-wing bloggers worked themselves into a lather about an attack on the French way of life.

Other commentators questioned the practicality of the measure and the ban has been lifted.

The Guardian’s Egypt correspondent, Ruth Michaelson, who also did freelance work for RFI when I worked there, has been kicked out of the country for writing an article questioning the reliability of the official Covid-19 statistics.

Unsurprisingly, I suppose, Sisi trolls have been kind enough to tell her this is a good thing on her Twitter feed. So, apparently, there are people who actually want to be poorly informed about the danger to their health.

The number of deaths in French hospitals reached 1,696 on Thursday, up 365 in the previous 24 hours. A 16-year-old died in Ile de France. There are 3,375 people in intensive care, while 4,948 people have been able to leave hospital having been declared cured.

Our neighbour, Marianne, is touched by a gesture of her friend Michelle, who has recovered from the virus. Michelle is making Marianne face masks.

Coffee filters sewn into tissue are the best way to improvise, she says, but be sure to use a new one every time you go out. I have no idea how effective this is.

As the population manages as best it can, frontline workers are facing the epidemic without an adequate supply of masks, hand cleanser and tests.

Several health-workers’ unions have lodged legal complaints, accusing government leaders of involuntary homicide and failure to take the necessary measures to combat a disaster, among other equally serious charges.

With five doctors already dead, a doctors’ union has appealed to the country’s highest court, the Conseil d’état, to order the government to provide surgical masks to the population and FFP2 masks to medical professionals urgently.

A business group estimates that 100 million need to be made every month for health workers alone. France could be producing 238,000 a day, according to Guillaume Gibault, the boss of a luxury underpants manufacturer who has brought together 90 companies that are ready to provide them. 

But a common design needs to be agreed, he told Le Monde.

Masks will probably also be imported from China.

There are encouraging stories of perfumiers converting to hand cleanser production, too.

But this should not be voluntary. The invisible hand of the market is not effective against the invisible hand of a worldwide epidemic.

When I lived in Coventry in the 1980s, a veteran socialist and engineering workers’ union activist had a favourite defence of economic planning. When World War II broke out, he pointed out, the cities’ engineering factories were converted to armaments production overnight by government order.

There was a downside – the concentration of war industry in the city drew the attention of the Luftwaffe, who bombed again and again, meaning that the city centre and much of the rest of the city is a sea of post-war concrete.

But the necessary weapons were produced. Now we need to produce the necessary medical supplies, not for use against fellow human beings but against a sometimes deadly virus.

A la guerre comme à la guerre! If we want to test, test, test, governments must requisition, requisition, requisition.  

Another memory from the UK comes to mind.

When I was a political activist living in Nottingham – yes, I got about a bit – I was asked to visit the village of Eyam, in the Peak District. The attraction of Eyam was that it was sufficiently remote to hold a meeting without too many people knowing about it and had the facilities to do so.

Eyam has a history of isolation. In the 17^th century the plague broke out there, due to infected material sent from plague-hit London, and the villagers voluntarily quarantined themselves.

“There is still on the outskirts of the village a location called the Boundary stone, where traditionally, money was placed in small holes for the provisions which those from the local area brought for the villagers,” the village’s website tells us today. “As a result of this action, the disease did not spread but almost a third of the villagers died.”

They remained in quarantine for 14 months. It was a beautiful sunny day like today when I visited Eyam. I don’t remember much from the trip but I was struck by how pretty the village was and disappointed that the meeting did not in the end take place there.