@Eddie my wife and I are pretty scrupulous at present and self-isolate except for essential activities beyond our front door. I have loaded the TousAntiCovid app to my phone and have had no alerts so far. My wife doesn’t currently go out alone so she hasn’t got the app. As we are both retired nurses we are pretty aware of potential risks and take evasive action on all fronts.
There is little in the regional Media about testing and tracing so far, but la Manche where we live is the least affected Department (so far) and compliance with preventive measures is almost universal from my observation.
My guess is additional restrictions for ‘hotspots’ starting Friday evening and if that fails a national lockdown for 3/4 weeks. Two mistakes the government made was telling everyone to go back to work in September (even those who could work from home) and encouraging people to take their usual Toussaint holiday.
Interesting change in the French figures in that the “doubling time” has had 4 days of consistent slow down (in fact cases for the past 2 days have been fewer than a week prior). Hospital admissions have plateaued as well.
It is too early to tell whether this will be sustained (especially as the previous slow down fizzled out), and way too early to be due to the lockdown but I wonder if people were starting to change their behaviour before the government stepped in.
Well they certainly were where we are. For the last couple of weeks a lot more people wearing masks on the street, on the beach, even some young people. Perhaps they are all beginning to understand…
Well, that statement was (possibly) prescient - > 50k again today and the increment compared with a week ago only just shy of twice as many positive results.
Obviously it is unwise to draw too many conclusions from a single day’s results but I suspect France is not out of the woods just yet.
IMO the lockdown is not strict enough to instantly drive down the infection rate, many more shops and businesses have been allowed to stay open and road traffic volume is barely any different to last week. The police and gendarmes have publicly said that in our area there is little point carrying out controls because most people are exempt from the restrictions.
My hope is that it will shock people into behaving better. Before the curfew was imposed, people round here seemed to have forgotten about the virus. Photos in local papers of football teams all squashed together, groups of people in our one local café all round same table etc etc. And we have a surprising number of anti-vaxxers who believe in herd immunity.
If social distancing had been maintained then none of this might have been necessary. This is an interesting (to me!) illustration of the ease with which this spreads
There was a very simple one… way back at the beginning… March/April I think… which showed the spread through the air… using someone unmasked in a supermarket setting…
Sadly, the possibility of “spreading through the air” was disregarded by too many people…
If more folk had taken notice, way back then… things might have been different…
I do hope this latest… very clear “explanation/description/warning” … is taken on board.
I think one of the problems was that the WHO itself did not make enough of airborne transmission. All the emphasis was on surface transmission.
I really feel the WHO have not covered themselves in glory with this one!
Given that it was clearly dangerous… too many folk fought against quite simple things… like wearing masks…
and they’ve still been moaning/not mask wearing just recently… as mentioned by poor @an_droo who had them coming into his shop and putting Andrew et al at risk…
It is clear that early on mistakes were made because we did not fully understand the virus and it turned out that its behaviour is not very like either 'flu or SARS1 - which people assumed it would be at the time.
We have, however, got to the point where ignorance of the virus’ behaviour is no longer an excuse.
More and more people are believing conspiracy theories. Honestly it is frightening. People are being radicalised. It sounds absurd but when you see people taken in by it, it is incredible.
Yes I do, Stella, I usually tell them to stay outside and they pay on the pavement, others just come straight in, some appologise, some don’t. But at the end of the day I’m in competition with 5 other tabacs so can’t afford to put them off! Everybody’s super pi$$ed off anyway, confinement + increase in tobacco prices, it ain’t easy running a tabac at the moment but I’m not complaining, I’m still open and turning over whilst plenty of others are slowly going under
