The French government has vowed to do everything possible to avoid a third national lockdown, but with cases rising sharply almost everywhere and hospitals in Paris overflowing, another crippling shutdown looks likely.
This week will be decisive for the strategy overseen by French President Emmanuel Macron and his government, who argue that every day without a lockdown is a bonus for France, which they see as exhausted after a year of restrictions.
New tougher measures were introduced on March 20 covering around one-third of the population, including the Paris region, but the French government stopped short of full stay-at-home orders, with many shops still open and people allowed to meet outside in small groups.
Pressure is now rising to close schools and go further, with many medics and epidemiologists warning that COVID-19 is out of control.
“If we arrive at a point where the risk is too great, we’ve always said a lockdown is the ultimate decision, the final resort,” French lawmaker Aurore Berge told the Public Senat TV channel on Monday.
France’s vaccine rollout has also been hit by a chronic shortage of doses, while the daily figures for new infections and hospitalizations make for grim reading.
Over the past seven days, an average of about 37,000 new cases have been reported daily, up one-quarter on the previous seven-day period, while bed shortages in hospitals in the most affected areas are becoming acute.
More than 40 doctors and emergency care directors from the Paris region on Sunday put their names to an open letter warning that hospitals would soon have to start rationing access to intensive care beds and select patients judged to have the best chance of survival.
“We cannot remain silent without betraying the Hippocratic oath we once made,” they wrote.
Macron has always made this a red line, saying that he would never force medical staff to make such life-or-death choices.
“In 10 days, 15 days or three weeks, we might be overwhelmed,” Remi Salomon, an official at AP-HP public hospitals in Paris, told the BFMTV news channel, pleading for a new lockdown.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees