5/8/2023 0 Comments France lockdown![]() Indeed, the government still allowed gatherings of up to 1,000 people to proceed. “It wouldn’t make sense to confine everyone at home, to paralyze the country,” he told a local television station. The government shuttered 120 schools in two regions, one of them an area north of Paris, as they had become among the hardest-hit areas in the country.īut even as tens of thousands of students were told to stay home, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer tried to downplay the move. It wasn’t until March 3 that France took real action. Macron also kissed Conte multiple times during the visit. Yet few concrete actions were taken to impose strict social distancing measures or promote large-scale testing.Īnd Macron didn’t even follow his own government’s advice: During a late February trip to Naples, Italy, he and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte took a stroll through the city, swarmed by press and onlookers, with whom Macron chatted and shook hands. And Macron held video conference calls on the virus and inspected hospitals and clinics to see how his country was coping. Health officials advised citizens to wash their hands, keep a safe distance from others, cover their mouths when sneezing, and stay away from retirement homes. They had just been to China, Buzyn said, adding, “We will probably have other cases.”īut if Macron’s government felt a sense of urgency, it didn’t show it.įebruary came and went with little action. On January 24, France’s then-Health Minister Agnès Buzyn announced that two people in the country tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known cases in all of Europe. ![]() The coronavirus “time bomb” Macron missed “We were not worried enough” early on, Pierre-Yves Böelle, an epidemiology expert at the Sorbonne University in Paris, told me. Marc Piasecki/Getty Imagesīut for the nearly 15,000 people who have died in the country from Covid-19 so far, Macron’s realization came far too late. “Like every country in the world, we have lacked gloves, hand gel, we haven’t been able to give out as many masks as we wanted to our health professionals.” Spectators watch as French President Emmanuel Macron speaks from the Élysée Palace during a televised address to the nation on April 13, 2020, in Paris. “This moment, let’s be honest, has revealed cracks, shortages,” Macron said. But we coped,” he said in a televised national address in which he announced an extension of the nation’s lockdown to May 11. “Were we prepared for this crisis? On the face of it, not enough. On Monday, Macron basically admitted as much. ![]() Much of the blame lies at the feet of French President Emmanuel Macron’s government, whose slow response and critical missteps in the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak set the stage for France’s current crisis. As the number of confirmed cases and deaths continues to rise, popular food markets have been turned into makeshift morgues and high-speed trains have become Covid-19 patient transport vehicles. The country’s health care system is consistently ranked among the best in the world, yet France has experienced shortages of hospital beds, masks, and other critical products. Yet the country currently has the fourth-highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases and third-most deaths in the world. One of Europe’s most powerful countries, France has a world-renowned health care system, immense wealth, ample social welfare, a centralized government, and a strong presidency. If any country should have been able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, you’d think it would have been France. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |