All schools and daycare centres to close for three weeks
President Emmanuel Macronย extended light lockdown measures from 19 areas including Paris to all of mainland France from April 3 for 4 weeks at a televised address on the resurgent Covid-19 pandemic on Wednesday.ย
Macronย widened the light lockdown measures currently imposed on a third of the French population โ including the Paris region โ to all of mainland France. โWe donโt have to lock ourselves in but we need to limit our contacts,โ he said.
โWe tried to push back this day for as long as possible โ but unfortunately it has now arrived,โ the president continued.ย โWe will lose control if we do not act now.โ
Macron also announced a closure of all schools and daycare centres for three weeks until April 26. Yet he also justified his policy of keeping them open since the end of the first lockdown in spring 2020, which has receivedย intensifying criticismย over recent weeks: โSchool is non-negotiable,โ he said.
Travel between different French regions will be banned for the duration of the nationwide light lockdown, while the 7 pm curfew currently imposed on the 19 regions will be extended to all of mainland France.
Confirmed Covid-19 cases per day in France have doubled since February to nearly 40,000, with the number of patients in intensive care units surpassing 5,000 on Tuesday โ exceeding the peak during the second lockdown last autumn.
On Wednesday, Franceโs complete death toll reached 95,337 since the start of the epidemic โ prompting Macron to warn that the country may reach 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the coming days.
On a more positive note, the president said that cafรฉ terraces and some cultural venues could re-open โunder strict rulesโ from mid-May.
Macron emphasised that jabs are the route out of the nightmare: โThanks to vaccines, the end of the crisis is on the horizon.โ
He said the governmentโs objective was to โaccelerate the programme as much as possibleโ โ promising that anyone over 60 will be able to get a vaccine from April 16 and anyone over 50 from May 15.
As the EU’s troubled jab procurement programme has led toย slowย inoculation rates, France hadย given outย a vaccine dose to just 11.75 percent of its population by March 29ย โย compared toย 45.19 percent in the UK, where the vaccine programme has raced ahead.
Text by:FRANCE 24
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