Tag Archives: South Korea

Coronavirus diary day 47 – Covid-19 boosts economy … with the truth

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At home, prepare the revolution, Poster by Atélier Youpi

The French government has opened an anti-fake news page on its website. Meanwhile, the health minister has assured us that more tests would not have reduced the number of Covid-19 cases, the official map of infection levels has had to be revised, and leaked documents show there will not be enough masks until June.

“The Coronavirus crisis encourages the spread of #fakenews,” the government’s indefatigable spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye declared in a tweet on Thursday.

So the government’s website now has a page linking to “viable and verifiable sources”. At least the sites are not run by the government. They are the fact-checkers of established media, such as Le Monde and Libération.

But these ingrates have not all been delighted by the official endorsement, which itself could lead the disaffected to see them as firmly ensconced in the establishment.

On top of which, some well-known media outlets, for example right-wing Le Figaro, left-wing Médiapart and the regional press, don’t figure on the good-guys list.

With immaculate timing, Health Minister Olivier Véran on the same day told LCI television, “A test doesn’t cure, it doesn’t change the treatment or the diagnosis … If we had tested absolutely everybody we would have more or less the same number of people ill.”

In South Korea, which is next door to China and has almost as big a population as France, there have been 10,780 confirmed Covid-19 cases, compared to France’s 130,185, (both figures are undoubtedly underestimates even if Véran implied in the same interview that the French statistics were accurate). South Korea’s death toll is 250, compared to France’s 24,594.

South Korea’s success in fighting the virus is universally attributed to a strict policy of testing, tracing and treating.

After publishing a map with three départements with practically no Covid-19 cases marked as heavily infected, the national health authority has been forced to issue a new one, having admitted that the original statistics were based on irrelevant information.

And Le Monde reveals that interior ministry internal documents point out that the masks that we are all supposed to wear in public once lockdown is lifted are unevenly distributed across the country, leading to the risk “that some French people will have too many and others won’t be able to find any”.

Not to worry though, the number of masks has “considerably risen in the last few weeks” and the situation should be sorted out by June, when we initially hoped all this would be over.

Let’s take a look back at our lockdown May Day.

Here’s a piper playing the Internationale on a Paris street.

The words to the Internationale were written by Eugène Pottier, who was elected to the Paris Commune and wrote them while in hiding from the repression that crushed it.

He fled to the USA and returned to France when an amnesty was declared in 1880.

The music was composed by Pierre de Geyter, a Belgian who lived in the northern French town of Lille, until he was obliged to leave because the bosses blacklisted him as a dangerous revolutionary.

And here and at the top of this post are some graphics for couch-stranded rebels, produced by the Atélier Youpi, which in normal times operates out of Saint Denis, the working-class town on the northern outskirts of Paris.

Stay/Resist at home Altélier Youpi

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,594, up 218 in the last 24 hours. 25,887 people are in hospital, down 396, with 3,878 in intensive care, down 141. 50,212 people have been discharged from hospital, 736 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 42 – Is digital snooping a price worth paying to fight the virus?

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The French parliament is to vote on the government’s post-lockdown plan as a single package. That means there will be no separate vote on the controversial tracking app that critics say will mean more digital surveillance of our lives.  

MPs are to vote on the plan tomorrow after it has been presented by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. It will then be presented to local council representatives, unions and employers the following day.

The hasty vote has come under fire from France Insoumise leader Jean-Muc Mélenchon on the left and Républicains leader Damien Abad on the right.

Even some of members of the ruling party are said to be unhappy that there will be no separate debate on the proposed StopCovid app, as they had been given to understand there would be.

Downloading the app, which will track you to see if you have been in contact with an infected person, will be voluntary and anonymous.

Some scientists argue that traditional practices can’t cope with Covid-19 and that immediate tracing of contacts is needed to combat the hyperinfectious virus.

Similar tools have been used in some Asian countries. South Korea was able to avoid lockdown at the cost of only 243 lives so far in part thanks to a similar app, although that was combined with far more extensive testing than what is on offer in France.

Critics warn that it could lead to yet more digital snooping than we already have, with data possibly exploited by the state for other purposes, such as limiting immigration, or by private companies, as happened in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The French government has already accessed mobile phone data to estimate how many people fled to their holiday homes before lockdown and several European countries, including Italy and Austria, have used digital tracking to help enforce their lockdowns.

That hasn’t stopped some commentators posing the question as a difference between Asian and European attitudes to individual liberties, as they have also suggested that Asians’ readiness to wear masks is “cultural”, rather than a result of their recent experience of epidemics and stifling levels of pollution.

As from today we can buy masks in French pharmacies, if we can overcome our cultural misgivings, which I suspect most of us will.

Another day, another study. This time researchers bring the cheery news that fewer lives are saved in intensive care than French officials have implied.

Health boss Jérôme Salomon previously announced that 10% of Covid-19 patients admitted to intensive care died. Researchers at Reva, a European artificial ventilation network, say that the real figure is now 30-40%.

On the bright side, a study in New South Wales appears to show that kids aren’t as toxic as we feared. Commissioned to prepare for the reopening of schools, it found that no teachers in the state had been infected by their pupils and that half of all cases identified were teachers.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,856, 252 in the last 24 hours. 28,217 patients are in hospital, down just five yesterday, and 4,682 are in intensive care, down 43. 44,903 people have been discharged from hospital, 309 yesterday.

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

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

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