Tag Archives: Coronavirus

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

April 19, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, France, South Korea, TaiwanTony Cross

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 19^th 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 10^th day, by 194, to 5,833. 35,983 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,563 yesterday.

Coronavirus diary day 33 – Discrimination and the virus

April 18, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, Discrimination, FranceTony Cross

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.

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

April 17, 2020CoronavirusChina, Coronavirus, FranceTony Cross

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.

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

April 16, 2020CoronavirusAmazon, Coronavirus, FranceTony Cross

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.

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

April 15, 2020CoronavirusAfrica, China, Coronavirus, FranceTony Cross

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.

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

April 14, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, Emmanuel Macron, FranceTony Cross

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.

Coronavirus diary day 28 – Far-right Catholics dodge lockdown, bosses want workers to pay

April 13, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, France, ReligionTony Cross

Fundamentalist Catholics dodged France’s Coronavirus lockdown to hold a secret mass over Easter. The clandestine service took place at Paris’s Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet church, which has been occupied since 1977 by a renegade order that insists on holding services in Latin.

Police were called on Saturday evening by local people who heard sounds coming from the church.

They fined the priest but say all the other participants had left by the time they arrived. About 40 people are said to have been there. Video posted online shows priests and choirboys but nobody in the pews.

Social distancing does not seem to have been observed and the host was administered by hand into the mouths of the faithful.

Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet’s rejection of any form of modernisation, even if ordered by God’s representative on Earth, makes it popular with the Catholic far right. To read about its post-1977 history is to dig into a deep seam of reaction.

Long-time National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reportedly often goes there to hear masses for dead friends. His estranged daughter Marine, who nicked his party off him, had her three children baptised there.

Maxime Brunaire, the young nutter who tried to assassinate then president Jacques Chirac during the 2003 Bastille Day parade, worshipped there and the editors of far-right rags like Minute and l’Oeuvre française have put in an appearance from time to time.

The funerals of Paul Touvier, the only Frenchman ever convicted of crimes against humanity, for his participation in the Holocaust under Vichy France, and National Front bigwig Jean-Marie Stirbois were held there.

Other churches in France have observed the lockdown, although a priest and his 13-strong flock were caught holding a mass on a campsite last month.

Other people worship mammon, notably the French bosses’ union, the Medef. Its leader, the magnificently named Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, has declared that the plebs will have to give up some of their rights to pay for the cost of the lockdown.

De Bézieux thinks that the length of the working week, public holidays and paid holiday should be reexamined once it’s all more or less over. As it happens, this is not the first time the Medef has raised these questions.

It doesn’t seem that de Bézieux has suggested to his members that they pay out lower dividends and invest in more productive technology in response to the crisis.

The junior minister for the economy, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, has also said we will probably have to work “a bit harder” to make up the loss of production.

Even the leader of the mainstream right Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, is shocked by these suggestions.

“The people who rule us have to put themselves in the French people’s place for a quarter of a second,” he told BFMTV. “If their answer once the crisis is over is more austerity, they haven’t understood a thing.”

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 14,393, a rise of 561 in 24 hours. 31,826 people are in hospital, up 506, but the number of people in intensive care has gone down for the fourth day running, by 38. 27,186 people have been discharged from hospital.

Coronavirus diary day 27 – Zebra on the loose

April 12, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, FranceTony Cross

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.

Gearges and Liliane Marchais welcome Fidel Castro chez eux

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.

Coronavirus diary day 26 – Sorrows of a sybarite

April 11, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, FranceTony Cross

A Portuguese-run stall on Champigny market last year

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.

Coronavirus diary day 25 – Indispensable, low-paid, disrespected and exposed to Covid-19

April 10, 2020CoronavirusCoronavirus, France, povertyTony Cross

Philippe had the virus. He was exposed to it because he does an indispensable job, even if that job is poorly paid and commands little respect.

Philippe is a dustman, leaving home during the night and returning in the early afternoon, all for a fraction of the salary that many less essential workers pocket. While the white-collar workers who live in our courtyard work from home, while the man in an apparently inessential branch of the building trade appears to be laid off, Philippe kept going to work. And so he caught the virus.

He’s a friendly man with a southern French accent – he came to the Paris area from the south-west. He lives in a ground-floor flat more or less opposite our house.

Philippe often opens the window – bare-chested and brown between the months of April and September – to chat with the neighbours. He hadn’t done that for a few days, so when he appeared at the window yesterday afternoon I asked if he had been ill.

He had, for about 10 days, he said. The experience had not been pleasant, he Added, but he’s recovering now.

This is not the first time his job has exposed him to illness. He once caught mange off a mattress, apparently.

Inequality is evident not just in exposure to the virus but also in our experience of confinement.

Philippe is stuck in his poky, dark flat. My mum and I are able to sit out in front of our house and three lucky neighbours actually have gardens. And then there are the inhabitants of the 16e arrondissement of Paris who headed to their holiday homes before lockdown was announced.

The town council asked Raphaël, the man who phones every day to check on Mum’s health, to go out and see how well the lockdown was being observed in the area he lives in, Bois l’Abbé.

Despite its pretty name, Bois l’Abbé is a working-class area with a lot of social housing, much of it tower blocks.

A lot of people had fled their less-than-luxury apartments to enjoy the sunshine, Raphaël reported. “People can’t take it any more,” he said.

I lived in a 10^th-floor council flat in Coventry in the 1980s and I can testify that it can drive you a bit nuts even when you’re not locked in to avoid an epidemic. Not everyone seems to feel the same way, but I found the lack of street-level social interaction – the sort of interchange you don’t even notice – isolating and depressing.

That’s what the inhabitants of Bois l’Abbé are trying to escape, even if they are perhaps unwise to do so at the moment.

“Those who live in tower blocks and small flats will find the lockdown a lot tougher,” as Emily Maitlis said on the BBC yesterday. “Those who work in manual jobs will be unable to work from home.”

And, as Raphaël says, the government has to take that into account when deciding the conditions for extending lockdown and how to wind it down when the time comes.

The government is putting more police on the roads out of town this weekend to stop city-dwellers who haven’t got the message trolling off on an Easter break.

There is hope we will soon reach a plateau, France’s top health official, Jérôme Salomon, says. “But it’s a very high plateau”.

More than 12,000 deaths from the virus have now been recorded. The deaths in care homes that were not accounted for yesterday have been added to today’s total.

But for the first time more people were discharged from intensive care than were admitted, slightly easing the pressure on the overstretched health service.

There were 41% more deaths in the week 30 March-5 April than usual, although not all those deaths were due to the virus.

France’s official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 12,210. 30,767 people have been hospitalised, up 392 in 24 hours, but the number in intensive care is down 82 to 7,066. There are 86,334 officially recorded cases but that is clearly an underestimate due to the lack of testing. 23,206 people have been discharged from hospital, up 1,952.

The Raving Reporter

Thoughts and reports by Tony Cross