PARIS — France thought it had crushed the coronavirus. Its comeback in a roaring second wave left the federal government scrambling this week for a half-measure that underscored its ugly decisions.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, highlighted his personal dilemma on Wednesday in asserting a curfew for Paris and eight different main cities. A brand new lockdown for an already reeling financial system would have been “disproportionate,” he mentioned, but the stress on intensive care beds was insupportable. “Our caregivers are exhausted,” he mentioned.
“The virus is recirculating very quickly in Europe and in our nation,” Mr. Macron mentioned in an interview on nationwide tv. France needed to “take again management.”
If the virus ever was below management in France, that was earlier than the summer season. However, consultants say, after that second, the French, like so many others elsewhere in Europe, let their guard down.
France’s attachment to its summer season holidays, younger folks’s exuberance in going out and partying, an absence of vigilance in carrying masks and social distancing, the dangers of resuming routine life, and the federal government’s failure — from the very begin — to successfully take a look at, hint and isolate contaminated folks have all contributed to an explosive second wave of infections.
Whether or not ordering folks, beginning Saturday, to remain of their properties from 9 p.m. to six a.m. is the reply — restaurant house owners and younger persons are already grumbling — can’t be identified instantly. However the dire outlook was simple. With a median of practically 20,000 new circumstances a day, well being consultants have been warning all week that the virus is uncontrolled in France, notably in cities.
“Proper now, we’ve acquired to place the brakes on it,” mentioned Yazdan Yazdanpanah, an infectious illness specialist on the French authorities’s Covid-19 advisory panel. “This curfew will restrict contacts,” he mentioned. “We’ve acquired to decrease the speed instantly. We don’t actually have a alternative.”
Mircea Sofonea, an epidemiologist on the College of Montpellier, mentioned that the brand new curfew got here in “the final doable week to react” to forestall hospital saturation. He famous {that a} new examine discovered {that a} curfew imposed in French Guiana diminished infections by 36 %.
Till Wednesday night time, Mr. Macron’s personal indecision had emphasised the quandary confronted by governments throughout Europe caught between faltering economies — France is going through a recession of practically 9 % — restriction-weary populations and a virus that won’t stop.
The federal government’s hesitancy was palpable this week. The prime minister, Jean Castex, chided the French for having “determined a little bit too rapidly” that the virus not posed a menace.
The identical day, the tourism minister, Jean Baptiste Lemoyne, urged folks to go on trip through the upcoming college break, to prop up the nation’s important tourism trade, whose revenues are half what they have been a yr in the past.
Mr. Macron himself acknowledged the impossibility of barring upcoming French vacation-going in his remarks on Wednesday night time.
Lulled by a comparatively profitable dealing with of the primary wave, the federal government didn’t firmly put in place a crucial triptych over the summer season — testing, tracing and isolation. The numbers are usually not as excessive as they have been final spring, however they’re unhealthy sufficient. Almost 100 folks died within the 24 hours ending Thursday morning, far beneath the 1,000-plus dying tolls of mid-April however nonetheless alarming.
Instances, flat by way of June and July, have been rising steadily since August, with 27,000 optimistic assessments reported final Saturday. An an infection price of 5 to six circumstances per 100,000 folks over the summer season has spiraled to almost 200 throughout France. It’s as much as 800 for 20- to 30-year-olds in Paris. The federal government has set the pink alert restrict at 150.
Within the interim, bars and gymnasiums have been shut in main cities. Institutions that serve meals stay open, even when cafe house owners report confusion about what qualifies as sufficient of a meal to maintain the police off their backs.
There have been blended messages, too, about going again to places of work. The president of the area that features Paris, Valérie Pécresse, appealed for a return final month, whilst infections began to rise. The result’s that central Paris bustles with workplace employees, in contrast with moribund downtowns in the US, although practically everyone wears a masks. On Wednesday, Mr. Macron inspired not less than a partial return to telecommuting.
The gestation of the present an infection growth was plainly seen in July, August and September. Guests packed France’s summer season watering holes after the federal government inspired tourism, anxious additionally to not get crosswise of the sacred ritual that’s the French summer season vacation.
A wave of indignation greeted delicate ideas that employees ought to hand over some trip days to compensate for these misplaced through the lockdown.
In Paris, as they returned from these scorching spots, younger folks spilled from crowded bars onto the sidewalks within the metropolis’s bohemian japanese districts and massed alongside the banks of the Seine. There was no social distancing and few masks. France thought the virus was tamed.
“There was actually a lack of awareness in part of the inhabitants that didn’t consider in a second wave,” mentioned Renaud Piarroux, an epidemics specialist at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. “Some within the youthful inhabitants deserted the mandatory precautions,” he mentioned, like carrying a masks and social distancing.
Earlier than Mr. Macron’s announcement on Wednesday, a number of well being consultants predicted a extreme reckoning within the coming weeks.
“It’s throughout,” William Dab, a former nationwide director of public well being who has been crucial of the federal government’s response, mentioned earlier this week. “We’ve misplaced the struggle. It’s uncontrolled.”
Mr. Dab chided the federal government for what he known as a “technique deficit” that had not motivated people to alter their conduct. Within the Paris area, he added, “there may be nothing left to be executed.”
The one ray of hope in France, as elsewhere, is that remedy strategies have improved because the spring, permitting extra sufferers to be saved. Nonetheless, the top of Paris hospitals, Martin Hirsch, warned on Tuesday that coronavirus sufferers would most definitely fill as much as 90 % of intensive care beds within the capital by subsequent week. Already greater than 1,600 of France’s 5,000 intensive-care beds are crammed.
A report from unbiased consultants, commissioned by the federal government and launched this week, concluded that France had executed much better than Britain, Sweden, the US and Southern Europe, however not in addition to Austria or Germany.
The French obeyed the lockdown imposed by the federal government in March, April and Might. Then, with circumstances flatlining, they flocked again into the streets, shops, cafes and eating places.
Residents let down their guard, reinforcing what Bernard Jomier, a member of the French Senate fee analyzing the federal government’s pandemic response, termed a “collective deficit of public well being tradition in our nation.”
“We’re a rustic the place the politics of prevention just isn’t a part of our tradition,” he mentioned in an interview this week. “There are parts in French society which can be favorable to the event of the virus.”
The consequence has been a “hesitation within the authorities’s official line,” mentioned Mr. Jomier, a Greens celebration lawmaker who represents a Paris district. “The governance of public well being just isn’t effectively organized.”
“Testing, tracing, isolating — this has been a failure,” he mentioned. “Badly elaborated, badly applied.”
At Charles de Gaulle Airport for instance, arriving vacationers are examined, however they don’t get the outcomes for not less than every week.
Contact tracing has additionally “failed,” Mr. Jomier mentioned; Mr. Dab, the previous public well being director, known as it a “fiasco” in an interview within the Journal du Dimanche in September, noting that the 5 contacts traced per case in July had dropped to 2.
“The variety of contacts could be very far beneath the precise variety of contacts,” mentioned Mr. Piarroux, the epidemics specialist. “It’s all occurring over the cellphone. So there’s much less motivation” to reveal the contacts.
Each he and Mr. Jomier additionally mentioned that isolation, the third a part of the triptych, had hardly been enforced, pointing to out-of-control an infection charges in shelters that home migrants.
On Thursday, French newspapers grimly recalled the curfew imposed through the German occupation, and trade teams known as for brand new assist for struggling eating places.
“We are able to’t work from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.,” mentioned Denis Kouch, the proprietor of a restaurant off the Champs-Élysées. “Individuals don’t even have time to reach, after which they’ve to depart instantly?”
Fixed Méheut and Antonella Francini contributed reporting.
