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AGI – Throughout the day, posters have arrived from Paris that all went in the same direction: France is preparing to approve a new national closure, exactly the one that until now the country’s leaders had said they wanted to avoid, to face a health emergency that beats by gravity even 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 night at 20.
The new “closure” will be slightly “softer” than the drastic one last March, will begin on Thursday at midnight and will last for one month. French data on the virus are dramatic: deaths in the last 24 hours have been 523, the highest since April. New cases were up 60% compared to a week ago and totaled 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 top scientific adviser, could be stronger than the first. The actual infections, the experts noted, would actually be more than 100,000 per day.
The new restrictive measures will be decided during the Defense Council that tomorrow will anticipate that of the ministers. According to rumors, everything can change until the last moment, but throughout the day the ground and public opinion have been prepared for the “worst”: that is the new “confinement” feared for the entire territory of the Hexagon and its approximately 67 million inhabitants.
“We will have to decide the measures to face 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 lockdown that can be located in the territory or at the national level”, recalling the rapid deterioration of the situation also in neighboring countries. The curfew currently in force affects 46 million French people and lasts from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.: among the hypotheses that are studied as alternatives to the new closure is also that of bringing it forward at 7:00 p.m.
The most likely scenario of a second “lock” is to keep them open anyway schools and shops and public transport services, a bit like in Ireland. In short, we would try to preserve “an appearance of economic activity to avoid catastrophes”, informed the president of the association of mayors, Francois Baroin, at the end of the meeting. Prime Minister Castex announced on Thursday a parliamentary debate on the new measures that he described as “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 inclining it towards drastic and unpopular measures, is the possible collapse of French hospitals: a few days ago, patients have been flown from one region to another to distribute the workload in the different intensive care units. Even if, experts warn, in this second wave the epidemic is not local but national.
