What's new: a virus and lots of questions

Audio 05:46

By: Frédéric Couteau Follow

Publicity

Since January 9, the date of the first information published in the newspapers on the coronavirus, many questions have been asked about the extent of the disease and the risks of contagion.

Le Monde tries to answer most of them in its Decryption section. Among these questions: " Why is this epidemic causing so much panic when the seasonal flu causes so many more deaths?" Here is the response from Le Monde : firstly because of its fairly high mortality rate. " According to a study by the CDC (the Center for Disease Prevention and Control located in the United States) published in 2017, the seasonal flu kills each season between 291,000 and 646,000 people. But it has a low mortality rate: around 0.006%, while the coronavirus kills 500 times more, or just under 3% of the humans it infects. "

Another factor that explains the global panic, Le Monde still points out, is the fear of the unknown: " The scale of the health response in China and of the media coverage is also explained by the fact that this virus is new and that there is no effective treatment or vaccine, whereas, for the better known seasonal flu, the large quantity of vaccines produced and distributed to the most vulnerable populations is a significant means of prevention. If the current epidemic were not taken seriously by the Chinese authorities, it would probably kill more people in China, and potentially in other parts of the world. "

Economic threats

Another important question: what impact on the world economy? " Even if it is too early to assess the consequences of the Chinese coronavirus epidemic, household consumption in the second largest economic power in the world is already hard hit, notes Le Monde , posing a threat to the rest of the continent. A slowdown in Asia, which generates almost two-thirds of global GDP growth, could have consequences for large companies around the world. "

We have been wondering for a long time what could limit globalization, well here it is, exclaims La Croix : " Up to now, nothing seemed to be able to slow down this historic movement, which is fueled by greed, the ideology of free trade and technological revolutions (IT and container transport). Certainly, over the past decade, protectionism has found strong supporters, starting with the President of the United States. But that hasn't yet made a big difference. So there is something to be struck, notes La Croix, seeing how quickly the epidemic of coronavirus causes reflexes to fall back. "

Indeed, specify Les Echos , “ like last year with the trade war, investors fear above all the consequences of a slowdown in China on the world economy. According to the IMF, China's share of global GDP rose from less than 9% in 2003 - at the time of the SARS epidemic - to more than 19% last year. In addition, China absorbed less than 6% of exports from the rest of the world in 2003, against almost 13% in 2018. ”This shows the impact of the virtual shutdown of the world's largest market…

And we come back to La Croix , which estimates that we could soon observe “ a reverse movement. When the epidemic wanes, business will resume more or less as before. But, the newspaper points out, something will still have changed in people's minds. This epidemic makes us more aware of the dependence of the international industrial production system on China, which has become the workshop of the world. The coronavirus is only a grain of sand in the cogs of the globalized economy but it reveals its fragility. "

Pension reform in the Assembly: parliamentary guerrilla warfare

Also on the front page, the battle over pension reform in the Assembly… The text has been examined since yesterday by the deputies and it is a real parliamentary guerrilla warfare which promises to be no less than 22,000 amendments tabled by the opposition, most of them from the rebellious France of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Suddenly, points Le Républicain Lorrain , “ those who, after more than 50 days of strike, believed in the imminence of a resolution of the conflict of the pension reform will be for their expenses. It is a deluge of amendments that threatens to examine the bill in Parliament. (…) The executive will have to play it fine if it wants to preserve the political advantage of an operation partly intended to consolidate its base of 25% of the electorate in anticipation of 2022. ”

" The impression is that the two years spent in discussion have been useless, sighs L'Union, and that we are moving into a strategy of barricades where everyone is certain to know the truth." That of the definitive withdrawal of the reform for some, that of the establishment of a universal regime guaranteeing greater equality for others. "

Some newspapers, such as La République des Pyrénées, point out the rebellious France: " if the National Assembly has the function of being the echo chamber of citizens in the drafting of the law through their representatives, it is up to fear that the sound will be saturated from the start, therefore inaudible, due to the desire for obstruction claimed by the training of Jean-Luc Mélenchon to scuttle the pension reform project by delaying it indefinitely by all procedural means. "

" That makes a lot… "

In any case, deplores Sud-Ouest , " the parliamentary debate begins when we know nothing about the future financing of pensions, nothing about the measures that will balance the system during the transition period until 2027, and not much from the financial projections. The Council of State has issued an unusually harsh warning to the government in this regard. It is true that the Financing Conference meets in parallel with parliamentary debates and that its conclusions, if it succeeds, will be incorporated into the bill in its final phase. But with the emergency procedure, the use of orders and the unknowns of an unfinished text, that is a lot. "

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• Newspaper
• coronavirus
• China