![]() The government responded to the worsening situation in mid-March with new restrictions on certain regions, affecting a third of the population. “For the entire month of February, there’s going to be an absence of goals, an absence of real strategy,” he said. Flahault said that despite the government’s decision to keep things open, no new measures were put in place to prevent a new surge. Macron rejected the advice of his own scientific council - a government body that the president had set up last year to advise him on coronavirus issues and that had pressed for a strict four-week lockdown. “I can state that I don’t have any mea culpas,” he told a French newspaper last Sunday.Īntoine Flahault, the director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, said that the French government had generally followed the advice of scientists until late January. Britain has vaccinated 46 percent of its population, and the United States 29 percent, according to data from The New York Times. France, like most of the European Union, lags far behind some other countries in inoculating its people.įrench health authorities on Wednesday said that about 8.5 million people had received at least a first shot of a Covid vaccine, or about 13 percent of the total population. Macron’s bet that tight restrictions were not needed appeared to be based on an efficient vaccine campaign that never materialized. ![]() Over the past week, France recorded an average daily tally of more than 38,000 new cases, nearly triple the number three months earlier. Cautrès said, adding, “The judgment that the French will make of the handling of the crisis will be the pillar of the 2022 election.”Īmid increasingly dire warnings from health officials, France on Tuesday reported more than 5,000 people in intensive care units for the first time since last April. “What appears today is, on the contrary, the idea of a head of state who plays it by ear and who doesn’t really know where he’s going,” Mr. ![]() Germany has also imposed a partial lockdown, with varying degrees of restrictions depending on the region, while Poland closed all nonessential shops and switched most of its schools to remote learning. ![]() Macron gave in to scientists and opposition politicians who had been pressing for a lockdown in recent weeks, and joined the list of European nations already hunkering down before the virus.Ībout three-quarter of Italy’s population is barred from going outside except for work, health or other essentials. He said that restrictions currently covering about one-third of the country’s population would be extended nationwide for four weeks starting Saturday, and that schools would be closed for at least three weeks.Īs the tally of coronavirus deaths pushed relentlessly close to the 100,000 mark, and with the highly transmissible variant first detected in Britain now accounting for two-thirds of France’s new infections, Mr. Macron effectively abandoned a monthslong gamble to keep France open in the hope that a steady pace of vaccinations would make a lockdown unnecessary. With infections surging, hospitals swelling with patients and the virus now reaching into classrooms, Mr. PARIS - After more than a year of lockdowns and months of a sputtering vaccination campaign, Europe’s efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic entered yet another difficult chapter on Wednesday as President Emmanuel Macron of France announced the start of a third national lockdown in a desperate move to halt a new deadly wave. ![]()
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