Slight politics changement in France about the epidemic:
"BACKPEDAL. Coronavirus: government catching up conceptually but not operationally. The press conference by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Health set the tone:
the executive has finally abandoned undifferentiated containment. The government has just realized that the results are no different from other countries that are less or not confined.
L'exécutif a enfin abandonné le confinement indifférencié. Le gouvernement vient de réaliser que les résultats ne sont pas différents d’autres pays moins ou pas confinés.
www.atlantico.fr
Here some excerpts/
summary:
Finally they're doing a U-turn.
The executive has abandoned undifferentiated containment; they are moving towards selective containment, quarantining the carriers of the virus, differentiating according to geography, and everything will be done at the local level. For six weeks now, French people have all been in confinement regardless of their region, their status with regard to the virus, their fragility. The government has just realized that the results are no different from other countries that are less or not confined.
Of course at the beginning a total lockdown was necessary and has been effective in reducing the virus spread, but now...
Conceptually, the recognition that
undifferentiated containment is generally ineffective and even harmful to those in non-epidemic areas is an important step that calls for further steps in understanding the epidemic over the long term. Indeed, we will have to live with the epidemic while waiting for treatment. And so we will have to monitor possible resurgent outbreaks and contain them not by a new generalised containment but by targeted measures and act quickly.
Selective confinement of vulnerable people is also on the agenda.
Differentiation is essential to be effective. The fantasized egalitarianism of situations as individuals is a tenacious but dangerous myth. Fragile people should not be forbidden to go out for a walk in a park (it is curious that they are closed
(???)), in the street, in a garden, but they should avoid going to places where interpersonal distance is impossible to respect, i.e. all shops and closed places, and tomorrow public transport. For this it is urgent to bring them their groceries in the emergency and then have them delivered. This can take a long time, which is why this organization is useful to set up. It is not a question of discrimination (the catch-all word of those who see the epidemic through their ideological lens) but of targeted measures whose effectiveness can be measured.
Confinement in its French form in the sense of the extreme limitation of people movement is not the decisive factor in the weakening of the transmission. The stopping of travel from high-activity foci to the rest of France certainly is, because the epidemic was initially very heterogeneous in nature.
Can state afford it?
The material is available, it has to be produced or bought. Given the experience accumulated in Europe the answer is quite easy to set up but as since January the question is the speed of public action. This is why
it is necessary to liberate the economic actors of the supply chain rather than wanting to make an all state affair. On the other hand, the impetus can come from the executive, particularly in a compromise of national interest with our companies to produce tests.
The offer must be as diversified as possible in order to succeed quickly. The first line is that of general practitioners, liberal nurses and medical analysis laboratories. Let them buy the equipment they need and test the population. Every time pre-emptions have been practised they have aggravated the shortage.
The Executive agreed that the response to the epidemic must be locally and adapted. Targeted, differentiated and therefore tailor-made logistical measures. This organization is the responsibility of local government administrations. We have immense resources, but they are at a standstill outside the front office of the fire brigade, police and hospitals. The other resource are the companies that have not been included in this logistics, which is regrettable. It is necessary to reopen all the companies that can do it and to encourage them to organize themselves to do so (thus the businesses). The administration must simply check that simple, cardinal measures, in limited number, have been taken by the company, the administration or the trader. Making the workplace, business or shop the safest place to do business is an achievable short-term goal that can make a major contribution to targeted control of the epidemic.
This is not the case after six weeks of containment.
The executive appeared more pragmatic yesterday at a press conference, at least much more so than the president who set a very distant and imprecise course (perhaps to bring it closer after a reassessment of the situation in the meantime?).
No longer talking about undifferentiated confinement, about overnight deconfinement, but going into the details of our lives in the pandemic by insisting on the responsibility of each and every one of us is a giant step forward. It remains for this government to get results. And there is still a great deal of uncertainty.