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.