France’s health minister is expected to announce a series of stricter measures amid rising COVID-19 cases and mounting hospitalisations.
It comes after the country recorded nearly 10,000 new cases in a single day on Thursday, a record high since the beginning of the pandemic.
Cases have risen at an alarming rate in cities essential to the economic life of the country including Paris, Marseille and Lyon, causing alarm about a second lockdown.
President Emmanuel Macron had promised that new measures would give some visibility about the weeks to come. Already some businesses are sending more employees to work from home.
The situation in France deteriorated amid a mass return from holiday and the start of school in September has contributed to rising cases.
As of Thursday, there were 32 schools fully closed in France due to COVID-19 and 524 classes sent home due to the virus spread, the French education ministry told Euronews.
But many say that it’s different than the previous outbreak in March. Roughly half of these new cases are asymptomatic and many are among young adults between the ages of 20 and 39 who develop less severe forms of the virus.
UK officials have said they want to learn from countries like France and Spain where hospitalisations are now rising. They recently closed pubs and restaurants in Bolton, where the incidence rate is lower than in many major French cities.
The head of France’s scientific council Jean-Franois Delfraissy has said that “the government will be required to take a certain number of difficult decisions in the next 8-10 days”.
Delfraissy has said that most of the infections are coming from gatherings in private, calling on French people to try harder to prevent infection.
Changes to quarantine
One of the big changes French officials are likely to announce is that the period of self-isolation for those who test positive for COVID-19 will be changed from 14 days to seven days.
Members of the scientific council said at a press conference recently that some people were not following the period of self-isolation.
Some experts have said that this measure follows the current evidence about the virus, even though most health authorities globally recommend quarantining for two weeks.
“We know that people are infectious for 5-6 days after their symptoms so theres really no point to enforce 14 days isolation for people when we know that one week after their symptoms they are not infectious anymore,” said Pascal Crpey, a professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health in Rennes.
Restrictions to private gatherings?
There could also be further restrictions on bars and restaurants after people became more relaxed about preventive measures over the summer.
But Crpey points out that the “set of measures that were in place [in June and July] were efficient enough to control the epidemic,” explaining that for months after the lockdown, cases remained under control despite restaurants and bars being open.
“Theres still time to adopt stricter measures,” Crpey says, explaining that there are tools we can still use to lower transmission in France.
But he says some stricter policies in other countries, such as limiting private gatherings or creating “social pods” might not work in France.
England, for instance, just limited private gatherings to six people but France’s high court ruled in May that public gathering restrictions cannot “extend to locations used for living,” meaning the government could not limit private gatherings.
“Its very difficult in France because what you do at home is your business so the state doesnt have anything to do with that…I think its a cultural thing as well. All policies need to be adapted to [governments’] own populations.”
Could France return to a strict lockdown?
French government officials have said that the economic crisis could become worse than the health crisis, insisting that they wanted to take local measures to address the crisis instead of doing a national lockdown.
These local measures have included making masks mandatory outside, including in major cities such as Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, and Nice.
When a cluster broke out in a nudist village in the south of France, local officials closed 17 establishments in order to curb the spread of the virus.
Local measures such as closing bars and restaurants would be “a much smaller blow [to the economy] than generalised lockdown where people cannot go to the office and cannot go to factories,” economist Nicolas Vron told Euronews.
“I think the general lockdown that affects manufacturing and services across a range of sectors which is very much what countries like France and Spain had implemented in the spring, that is unlikely to come back.”