The situation is deteriorating in France due to the explosion of business: restrictions are imposed on Dunkirk

PARIS.– The health situation “worsens” in France, where new variants of Covid-19 cause huge increase in cases, and force the government to change its strategy and to partially confine certain departments of the country.

“The situation is very worrying in ten departments, which requires the imposition of rapid and strong measures”, admitted the spokesman of the government, Gabriel Attal, during a press conference.

Three weeks after President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise decision to no longer confine the country, maintaining only a curfew between 6 and 6 throughout the territory, the executive is again under pressure due to an epidemic virus. The cause: an increase in epidemics caused by a strong circulation of new strains. And if there are only three, for the moment, the departments which are suffering from an explosion in the number of cases (Alpes-Côte d’Azur; Moselle, in the east, and Dunkirk, in the north), the whole country is holding its breath.

Nationally, with 31,519 cases recorded in the past 24 hours (85,472 deaths since the start of the pandemic), “the advance of the British strain is so significant that the number of positive cases is increasing every day. In one week, we erased the consequent reduction in the cases that we had recorded so far, ”lamented the Minister of Health Olivier Véran. The official in turn recognized a situation “very worrying in ten departments”, including Paris and its surroundings..

Partial and local containment was decided two days ago in the Alpes-Côte d’Azur for the next two weekends to deal with the unprecedented number of cases in Nice and its region. The same was announced by Olivier Véran in Dunkirk. The government has also decided that it will not lift any restrictions in place in areas with the lowest incidence.

In Dunkirk and the surrounding municipalities, where around 250,000 French people live, with 1 in 100 inhabitant infected every week, the incidence rate of the agglomeration (900 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in 7 days) is four times higher than the national average (205 cases) and well above the alert threshold set at 250 cases per 100,000.

Preview of a new variant

The city will therefore be confined from Friday evening to Monday morning for the next weekends. Local authorities had warned in mid-February about the progression of infections, with more than 70% of the English strain in this town near England.

“We are here to make the decisions that are imposed,” said Véran, who visited the city to announce the measure. “The hospital is overcrowded, the staff is exhausted. I now hope that our fellow citizens will respect the decisions, ”he added.

As in Nice, on the shores of the Mediterranean, weekend trips will only be possible for compelling reasons and non-essential shops will close. In any case, Macron and his Prime Minister, Jean Castex, reject the idea of ​​applying a “zero Covid” strategy with strict and extended containment to end the epidemic once and for all, as proposed by several members of the Committee of Experts which advises the Elysée.

“This measure will not allow us to eradicate the virus”, affirm the collaborators of Castex, alluding to the case of Germany, where the curves of contamination do not decrease despite the strict restrictions imposed since mid-December, in particular the closure of schools.

However, the government hopes that “the light will reach the end of the tunnel,” according to Attal’s statements. In addition to saliva tests, which will be massively distributed in schools at the end of the current winter holidays, the executive is betting on the vaccination campaign, the pace of which is gradually accelerating.

“Today, the majority of people living in nursing homes have been vaccinated (75%) and, in a short time, we should start to see the positive effects,” said Alain Fischer, coordinator of the strategy of French vaccination.

Last Monday, after meeting Paul Hudson, CEO of French laboratories Sanofi, Macron welcomed the company’s decision to produce the Covid-19 vaccine from its US competitor Johnson & Johnson in France.

“Together, we must accelerate vaccine production through industrial partnerships,” the president said on Twitter. Sanofi is also involved in the production of the Pzifer-BioNTech vaccine, for which it uses one of its plants in Germany.

For Macron, it is a way of “increasing the supply” and an additional weapon to respect the promise to vaccinate all French adult volunteers “before the end of the boreal summer”.

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