Paris (AFP)
No procession and hardly thrush, the French spend their May 1st confined, coronavirus obliges, with a multitude of questions on the conditions of the deconfinement on a background of quirks around the card presented the day before by the government.
To celebrate International Workers' Day, unions go through social media and call for demonstrations from balconies while President Emmanuel Macron salutes "the spirit of May Day".
"It is thanks to the work, celebrated this day, that the Nation is holding," he said in a video posted on social networks, ensuring that the French will find "May 1 happy".
In the crosshairs, health workers, employees in commerce, the food industry, paramedical, social, maintenance, public service agents, on the front line in the fight against coronavirus.
Masked in front of the statue of Joan of Arc for May 1 of RN, Marine Le Pen estimated that "today everyone should wear a mask in public space", a "measure of minimum protection "against coronavirus.
Masks whose price will be capped at 95 euro cents per unit for the surgical paper version and for single use but not for the fabric version, announced the Secretary of State to the Minister of Economy Agnès Pannier -Runacher.
While a second wave of the epidemic is feared in hospitals, masks are one of the prerequisites to minimize the risk, recalled on RTL Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the infectious diseases department of Bichat hospital.
"At some point you have to deconfine, which you deconfine tomorrow or in a month you take a small risk", "it is very important that a certain number of prerequisites, tests, masks, distancing, have been identified "," the risk if one is ready, if one has prerequisites, is low ", estimated the doctor himself victim of the virus.
In view of the gradual deconfinement, the executive presented a provisional card on Thursday evening classifying departments in red, orange and green according to the state of the epidemic and the intensive care units.
- Counting errors -
But a few hours later, hiccups began to rise from certain departments not understanding why they were classified "red": Haute-Corse, Lot and Cher.
The regional health agencies (ARS) concerned have recognized counting errors.
In the Lot, "which is not at this stage among the most impacted by the epidemic", this ranking "has aroused strong and legitimate misunderstandings," noted ARS Occitanie. Regarding the Cher, "we believe that there have been data errors and the objective is that the correction can be made as quickly as possible", according to Christophe Lugnot, chief of staff of the ARS Center.
The Corsican ARS for its part indicated that "the modalities of coding by the Bastia hospital center lead to an overestimation of the number of emergency visits for Covid".
The president of the Lot department, Serge Rigal, expressed his dissatisfaction for this "error of the year" in a letter to the Ministry of Health.
"If there are bugs on the ranking it is because the system remains too centralized", lamented on Franceinfo François Sauvadet, president of the Côte-d'Or, department classified red in particular because it welcomes patients from departments neighbors, he explained.
In Dordogne, the president of the department Germinal Peiro said he was "amazed" by the classification in orange, recalling on France Bleu Périgord that "there are very few cases in Dordogne, that the hospital of Périgueux is absolutely not saturated, and that the departmental laboratory (…) has the capacity to make 1,000 tests per day ".
The prefecture, however, recalled that this confirmed "the need for Périgourdines and Périgourdins (...) to maintain vigilance and civic-mindedness while respecting confinement and barrier gestures".
About a third of the departments are classified red, with no surprise, the whole of Ile-de-France and the northeast quarter of the country, the two main areas affected. The rest of the country is divided between orange and green.
The map will be updated daily until May 7 where only two categories will remain, green and red, which will determine the level of relaxation of the restrictions from the deconfinement scheduled for May 11.
In the green departments, a lesser presence of the virus will make it possible to organize a wider deconfinement, with in particular the opening of parks and gardens or the resumption of college.
The coronavirus has claimed 24,376 lives since March 1, of which 289 in the past 24 hours. The Director General of Health, Prof Jérôme Salomon, however stressed that the intensive care services now count 4,019 patients (-188 in 24 hours) against nearly 7,200 on April 9.
© 2020 AFP