London (AFP)

Gloved, Stéphanie Cheung places a shopping bag on the doorstep of a stranger in her neighborhood. She only met her recently on one of the self-help groups that appeared on Facebook in the UK in the face of the new coronavirus epidemic.

This 31-year-old Londoner steps back a few meters before calling the local resident on WhatsApp, a woman in her thirties with bronchitis, who reimburses her directly by Paypal.

Such symptoms warranted isolating themselves before general containment was decreed on Monday evening in the United Kingdom, where the Covid-19 has killed more than 400 people and is spreading faster and faster.

On a city, district or street scale, these local self-help groups are flourishing on social networks, to solve the problems posed by the pandemic, primarily to help the elderly or frail.

The craze quickly surpassed this mission: here a mistress offers advice to help with school at home, there a cardiac and asthmatic man asks - and receives in quantity - masks to be able to walk his dogs in all security.

xOn the self-help group in the district of Lewisham (in south London), there is even a request that is a bit wacky but desperate: a man infested with rats is looking for - in front of the impossibility of bringing in rat destroyers-- to "temporarily adopt" the cat of one of its neighbors.

Appearing throughout the country, these groups are almost all available on WhatsApp in several hyper-local conversations - by neighborhood, even blocks - used for organization and coordination.

The phenomenon is massive: more than one million people in the UK have joined one of the local aid Facebook groups, including 800,000 last week, a spokesperson for the social network said on Monday.

These "good Samaritans" are now connected via "hundreds of new local groups," said Brie Rogers Lowery, Facebook Europe director of community partnerships, in a statement sent to AFP. She finds it "comforting to see people across the UK coming together to help their neighbors and their community."

- Larger scale -

For Stéphanie Cheung, the trigger came on Sunday when her "heart sank in frustration" when she saw an elderly couple forced to come and shop in a crowded grocery store.

Previously "worried" about the crisis, she now feels "invigorated by community work".

"And it is undeniable that social networks are essential in this process," she judges. "They allow you to reach something bigger than yourself, to do more things than if you put words in mailboxes."

"Often strangled" in recent years, social networks play a major role in the construction of this new form of solidarity by making possible "larger-scale collaborations to solve common problems", explains Nick Bostrom, in charge of University of Oxford for a study program on the impact of technologies.

They respond, he said, to the "need to work together against a common enemy". "Most of the time, we don't have a real enemy so we make it up," says the professor. "Now that we have a real enemy, solidarity is emerging."

"It feels good to know that you are doing something useful and to work as a team," said Kim Wilson, a member of a self-help group in West London. She hopes that this "community spirit" will continue in the neighborhood, "even after the virus".

This school teacher believes, however, that "Facebook is a good starting point" but that we must also "think outside the internet" and distribute leaflets, bearing in mind in particular that the elderly are far from 'be all on social media.

Malicious, she sells the merits of old-fashioned paper classified ads, with an email or a phone number to detach, which also reappear in the streets of London.

© 2020 AFP