On New Year’s Eve, Emmanuel Macron promised France an economic revival by the Spring. Cancel that. Instead, as the intensive care units are saturated by a third wave of Covid, we have a new lockdown light and a new message from the president: ‘Don’t panic.’
More than a year after Macron the general took personal command of the war on the new coronavirus, the vaccination program has still to get into high gear, the doctors are threatening to triage patients, abandoning those with little hope, yet there was no hint of contrition from the president.
Instead, he announced that we are to be subjected to yet another baffling set of rules which together comprise a sort of ‘confinement,’ although Macron never used the word.
French people are increasingly fed up with the restrictions on their lives
Macron is said to have held at bay the ‘enfermistes’ urging a tighter lockdown. Relying on his own instincts as an autodidact epidemiologist, he has decided on a bouquet of measures, including a temporary shutdown of schools and limitations on travel and non-essential commerce.
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