From January to February 2021, daily Covid-19 infection rates hovered around 20,000 while President Macron played a long game. His aim was to roll out vaccinations (criticised by many as being slow to get started) but also to keep the country out of another strict lockdown, like the one in March 2020.
His prize is not just to steer the country through Covid-19 but also presidential re-election in April 2022–Macron has a lot of political capital riding on the fact that he didn’t lockdown France like his EU neighbors did in January or February; he has favoured regional lockdowns instead.
Wednesday evening, however, he was forced to yield a little and close schools and extend the partial lockdown currently in place to the entire country.
The situation
Covid-19 cases have been rising for the past few weeks. Daily figures are hovering at the 40,000 level for new cases, which is not far from the 50,000 new daily rates seen before the second lockdown in October.
Dunkirk and the French Riviera were put under a nighttime and weekend curfew at the end of February and at the same time, 19 regions across France were put on ‘high alert’, meaning that cases were rising fastest.
Just two weeks later, on 15 March, Paris was put into a strict 4-week lockdown with the French health minister Olivier Véran saying that “every 12 minutes night and day, a Parisian is admitted to an intensive care bed.”
President Macron addressed the nation Wednesday to announce new nationwide measures, saying that “the virus continues to circulate fiercely” and that “over the past few days we have entered into a race. On one side is the vaccination and on the other is the propagation of the English variant” of Covid-19.
Macron encouraged people to get vaccinated, reiterated how well the country had done to avoid lockdown for so long and said that “if we organise ourselves, work together, we will see the end of the tunnel together.”
New restrictions
The following restrictions are in place across France:
- schools will close for 3 weeks nationwide and opening hours will change for the next 4 weeks–there will be one week of remote learning for everyone, two weeks holiday and one week of remote working for most children (but little children can return to primary schools and nurseries on 26 April). University students can attend one day per week throughout the next 4 weeks and the rest of the time will be remote learning.
- from Saturday night, the partial lockdown currently in place in 19 regions will be extended to the entire country, from 3 April to 2 May.
- the curfew is still in place at 7pm.
- everyone should work from home.
- non-essential shops will be closed.
- no inter-regional movements after 5 April (this allows everyone to get in place for the restrictions).
- people will need to download permission forms (attestations) for travel more than 10km from home.
- no getting together, either friends or family over Easter or otherwise.
The Good News
France has been doing well on vaccinations after a snail-like start—400,000 single doses were administered between last Thursday and Friday evening, with 1 million given in just three days, as reported by The Local.
So far, 7 million doses have been given out, covering roughly 10% of the population. The aim is to vaccinate 10 million people by mid-April, 20 million by mid-May and 30 million "by the summer."
Dentists and vets will likely join pharmacists in being able to administer the Covid-19 jabs and France's supply is being ramped up by both Pfizer and Moderna from April onwards, meaning that nearly 250,000 more medical staff will be able to deliver millions more doses.
The Bad News
France’s neighbors have now classified the country as a high-risk zone and are checking arrivals from France across their borders. As reported by rfi, Germany has mandated extra controls at the French border, with a possible need for quarantine. Spain now requires a negative Covid-19 test result to pass from the French border and in the U.K., Boris Johnson warned of new restrictions against French travel, “very soon”, as reported by The Telegraph.
The head of Paris' hospitals group called on Sunday for a complete lockdown with all schools closed. Analysis shows that Paris’ hospitals would–on current rates of infection and hospital admissions–have to start deciding which patients are saved, with triage including both Covid and non-Covid cases arriving at the hospitals. They wrote that they had “never known such a situation, even during the worst (terror) attacks suffered in recent years.”
Ever since France emerged from the first lockdown, the French government has been committed to keeping schools open, which they have. However, in the regions under partial lockdown, just one case in a class will lockdown the entire class and more and more schools are being forced to close. Hence, the decision to close schools for 3 weeks.
A new variant of Covid-19 has been discovered in Brittany, which appears to be undetectable by the standard PCR test. As reported by The Local, it is under surveillance by the World Health Organisation but not currently being treated as seriously as the variants first identified in the U.K., South Africa or Brazil. Brittany has been reporting very low rates of Covid-19 but the concern might be that the reason for this is that the virus is not being detected by standard testing.
Another new variant has also been identified this week, called the Henri Mondor variant after the hospital in which it was discovered in 29 patients in Créteil, south east Paris. As reported by Le Figaro, there are no indications that the variant is more or less contagious than the current known variants.
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