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Clients watch French President Emmanuel Macron on a TV screen in a cafe in Paris as he delivers an evening address to the nation, to announce new measures aimed at curbing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The governments of Europe’s two largest economies on Wednesday ordered their populations into strict one-month lockdowns, including the closures of all bars and restaurants, in a desperate attempt to fight the severe spike of COVID-19 that threatens to engulf their national health systems.
- French President Emmanuel Macron, in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday night, warned that the second wave of the virus would be “harder and deadlier” than the first, and could cause 400,000 fatalities in France if nothing was done.
- German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the lack of action could cause “an acute national health emergency” without prompt action.
- Both countries avoided a return to the strictest measures of the first lockdown earlier this year. Even though bars and restaurants will be closed as well as gyms and swimming pools, schools will remain open, and, in France, a long list of exceptions will allow retailers of goods deemed “essential” to remain open.
- Macron said factories and workplaces would keep functioning, even though work from home will be encouraged by the state. But people will need a special document to venture out of their homes.
- France closed its borders to visitors from outside the Schengen free-travel area, and domestic travel from one French region to another will be banned.
- Macron said the aim of the new restrictions is to take the number of daily new infections in France to around 5,000. From his own account, the current number of between 40,000 and 50,000 underestimates the real situation by half.
The outlook: France is one of Europe’s worst-hit countries by the coronavirus pandemic, and Germany the country that best dealt with it. The fact that parallel measures are announced on the same day will reinforce the criticism that Macron is acting too late, in contrast to Merkel taking radical measures much earlier in the pandemic cycle.
Macron and his prime minister Jean Castex resisted in the last two months the advice of the government’s top health experts, who argued that tougher measures should have come much earlier in order to prevent the worst of the pandemic’s second wave. As the French parliament has just debated the details of a €100 billion stimulus plan to counter the effects of the initial COVID-19 outbreak, the government now faces another economic shock — and potentially an even harder one, if Macron’s prediction proves true.
Read: Second COVID wave brings the European economic recovery to an end
