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.
Many women prisoners and their babies in the UK, who are not considered dangerous (who have committed crimes such as theft or fraud) are being released, which begs the question, why were they imprisoned in the first place? For being poor, apparently.
Another reflection on social responsibility came to me when – on an (authorized) walk- I came across a bunch of youths playing basketball on a court just next to one of Paris’s big hospitals. Maybe they thought this would help them if they needed emergency care, despite the fact that group sport activities are explicitly banned.
My first thought was to alert the police if we chanced upon a patrol. But there was something nagging at the back of mind. It was the term délation, redolent with the gruesome stories from wartime France when people denounced Jews, resistance fighters – or simply neighbours or trade competitors they didn’t like – to the Gestapo or the collaborationist Vichy police. To be sure, supporting police repression in the interests of public health is of a different order, but I have to admit to some slight relief that the absence of police in the vicinity relieved me of some potential moral embarrassment. Given the location of the basketball venue, I have no doubt that the majority of the young players were black or brown. And why should that have made me less than enthusiastic about getting the police onto their case?