Paris (AFP)

Emmanuel Macron takes stock Tuesday morning during a defense council on the Covid-19 epidemic to prepare a new turn of the screw of the fight measures, which could go as far as a reconfinement.

The defense council, held since 10:00 am in the presence of Prime Minister Jean Castex and a dozen ministers, is the first in a series of meetings scheduled within 48 hours.

At the end of the afternoon, Jean Castex will receive the political leaders then the social partners in Matignon to "consult" them on "the envisaged hardening".

Then a new defense council will be held on Wednesday morning to make the decisions that will be announced to the French by the end of the week.

"At one point we have to take tough decisions (...) like all our European neighbors," he added on France Inter, referring to the new restrictions planned in Italy, Spain or the Czech Republic.

The President of the Scientific Council, Jean-François Delfraissy, had prepared the ground Monday by qualifying the situation in France of "critical", and by expressing fears that the second wave is "stronger than the first".

- The pressure is building up -

The number of confirmed positive cases increased by 26,771 in 24 hours, according to figures from Public Health France on Monday.

The day before, France had broken a new record with more than 50,000 positive cases confirmed in one day.

Professor Delfraissy even estimated that the real number of contaminations would turn "around 100,000 cases per day".

The number of patients in intensive care continues to climb, increasing the pressure on hospitals.

Their number stood at 2,761 on Monday, for a total of 5,800 sheave beds throughout France.

Taboo a few weeks ago, the reconfinement hypothesis is now considered a necessity by a growing number of scientists and politicians, who hope to avoid it being national and total.

We will "have to deal with weeks which will be more than difficult", predicted the infectious disease specialist Gilles Pialoux, speaking in favor of the adoption of a "drastic measure, which will be called confinement".

For him, "the current difficulty" lies in the "national dimension of the epidemic (...) whereas we were rather in a concentrated epidemic (on a few regions, editor's note) in France in the first wave".

Therefore, "talking about regional containment with the data currently circulating that does not make sense," added on BFMTV the head of the infectious diseases department at Tenon hospital in Paris.

Professor Delfraissy had put forward two "hypotheses" on Monday, the first of which is "to move towards a more massive curfew", both in its schedules, in its extent at the national level, and which can also be put in place on weekends. "The second is" to go directly to confinement ", but" less hard "and shorter than that of March to May, according to him.

In this case, the question arises in particular of the reopening of colleges, high schools and universities on November 2 after the All Saints holidays.

France has already entered partial confinement, since two in three French people are now subject to a night curfew.

This concerns 54 departments in addition to Polynesia, or 46 million French people deprived of travel between 9:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.

Politicians seem resigned to the toughening of measures.

The leader of LR deputies, Damien Abad, thus estimated on France Info that the government did not have a "good solution" but urged him to "avoid a generalized confinement of the country which would put the whole economy on the ground ".

- Risk of economic collapse -

"I prefer local confinements at All Saints' Day than general confinement at Christmas," he added, calling on the French to "be brought together to both save lives and save the economy".

"A new confinement should only be the last resort, because it will have cataclysmic consequences on economic life", for his part warned on Cnews the vice-president of the National Gathering Jordan Bardella.

The president of Medef, Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux, warned Monday on the fact that "if we completely reconfine as we did in March, it is not less 10% of recession that we risk, it is a collapse of the economy ".

The Confederation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (CPME) also warned on Tuesday against the risk of a "collapse of the French economy" in the event of "total or partial reconfinement".

"Companies are now much more fragile than in March and many of them, especially the smallest, would be unable to take on additional debt," she said.

On the night of Monday to Tuesday, the deputies voted in first reading the first phase of the recovery plan, 22 billion in 2021 out of the 100 billion planned by 2022, a plan supposed to allow France to bounce back from the economic recession.

In March, confinement was decided to prevent the hospital system from creaking under an excessive influx of Covid patients.

The epidemic has killed 35,018 people in the country since its inception, according to figures from Public Health France.

© 2020 AFP