Macron: It is "too early to say whether we are going towards local or wider reconfigurations"

The hypothesis of a reconfinement continues to hover.

Asked about the subject, during a trip to Pontoise, the President of the Republic replied that "it is too early today to say whether we are going towards local or wider reconfigurations", the day after the announcement an extension of curfews to curb the second wave of Covid-19, with which we will have to live "at best until the summer of 2021".

"We have to do this"

"In this phase we are in, we have no other choice, given the number of infections per day, than to reduce our social life as much as possible (...) if we really want to preserve our health system and our fellow citizens ", underlined the Head of State after a meeting with the teams of the René-Dubos hospital center in Pontoise, in Val-d'Oise.

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"We are obliged to do that," he insisted the day after the extension to 54 departments of the curfew measures.

"In the middle of next week, we will have a clearer vision of the impact of the measures we have taken and we will have decisions to take in the coming weeks to adjust things," he added, inviting the French to "become one with all the nursing staff".

Strengthened rather than reduced measures

While Prime Minister Jean Castex had mentioned the day before "much harsher measures" if the epidemic was not curbed, Emmanuel Macron said that it was "too early today to say whether we are going towards re-containments local or larger ".

The measures already taken are however "not intended to be reduced but they will perhaps be strengthened if they are not sufficiently effective", he warned, either "by expanding geographically" or by targeting more precisely "the places and times when the epidemic is spreading the fastest".

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Regarding vaccines, the Head of State estimated that the first vaccinations could take place at the end of 2020, the beginning of 2021 but considered "unlikely" to have so quickly a "national strategy that allows to respond to the virus".

"We have hopes for treatments, now for vaccines and then, we realized that it was not working totally. Clinical tests are still underway, so things have not stabilized and we can think that we will have more visibility at the end of the 1st quarter of 2021 ", he added, urging caution and recalling that it was necessary" to vaccinate between 20 and 40% of the population so that things really start to have an impact ".