AGI – Throughout the day from Paris there were signals that were all going in the same direction: France is preparing to approve a new national lockdown, exactly the one that until now the leaders of the country had said they wanted to avoid, in order to face a health emergency that it is surpassing by gravity even that of last spring. According to the latest rumors, a council of ministers will approve the measure tomorrow, which will be announced by President Emmanuel Macron to the French in a speech to the nation scheduled for tomorrow evening at 20.
The new “confinement” will be just “softer” than the drastic one of last March, will start on Thursday at midnight and will last a month. The French data on the virus are dramatic: the deaths in the last 24 hours have been 523, the highest since April. New cases have increased by 60% compared to a week ago and amounted to 33,417. Across France, it has accumulated 1.243 million cases since the start of the pandemic and 35,575 deaths. The second wave, said the government’s chief science adviser, could be stronger than the first. The actual infections, the experts pointed out, would actually be over 100,000 per day.
The new restrictive measures will be decided during the Defense Council which tomorrow will anticipate that of the ministers. According to rumors, everything can change until the last moment, but for the whole day the ground has been prepared and public opinion for the “worst”: that is the feared new “confinement” for the whole territory of the Hexagon and the its approximately 67 million inhabitants.
“We will have to decide on measures to cope with the exponential increase in the epidemic – confirmed, at the end of a meeting of Prime Minister Jean Castex with political leaders and associations of parliamentarians, evoking among other things “an extension of the curfew or a confinement that can be localized in the territory or nationally”, recalling the rapid worsening of the situation also in neighboring countries. The curfew currently in force concerns 46 million French and lasts from 21 to 6 in the morning: among the hypotheses being studied as alternatives to the new closure there is also that of bringing it forward to 19.
The most likely scenario of a second “lockdown” however is to keep them open schools and shops and public transport services, a bit like in Ireland. In short, we would try to preserve “a semblance of economic activity to avoid catastrophe”, the president of the association of mayors Francois Baroin reported at the end of the meeting. Prime Minister Castex announced a parliamentary debate on Thursday on the new measures that he called “indispensable”. The opposition parties accused the majority of “improvisation, panic, lack of strategy”. An “erratic handling of the health crisis” was particularly denounced by the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen.
What worries the government above all, to the point of making it lean towards drastic and unpopular measures, is the possible collapse of French hospitals: a few days ago, patients have been transferred by plane from one region to another to distribute the load of I work on the different intensive care units. Even if, experts warn, in this second wave the epidemic is not localized but national.
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