A new health defense council was held on Wednesday, with the key to maintaining the restrictions currently in place in France to curb the Covid-19 epidemic.
January 20 was initially supposed to mark the date for the reopening of bars and restaurants, according to the progressive deconfinement plan presented at the end of November by Emmanuel Macron.
From now on, the managers of bistros and cafes do not expect to welcome customers for a long time, nor do visitors to cultural places.
Only the ski resorts are waiting to know, with low hopes, if they will be able to restart their ski lifts during the February school holidays.
The answer should fall by the end of the week.
The health situation is far from improving in France, even if it does not reach the dramatic level of the United Kingdom, where a daily record of 1,610 deaths was recorded on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, the number of Covid-19 patients received in one day in the intensive care unit rose above 300, which had not been the case since November 19, at the end of the second wave.
Over the past seven days, more than 10,000 new hospitalizations have been recorded, an indicator that is also improving.
The level of hospital deaths remains stable, at 373 dead on Tuesday, for a total death toll of 71,342 since the start of the epidemic (hospital and nursing home combined).
"We are not for the moment in a dramatic increase in the number of infected and deaths [...] we are rather on a slightly ascending plateau", analyzed, on BFMTV / RMC, the head of the infectious diseases department at Saint-Antoine hospital, Karine Lacombe.
But with the expected spread of the 'VOC 202012/01' variant, which has overwhelmed the UK healthcare system, 'March is expected to be very tough.
The third (wave), which is announced for March, risks drowning us, ”said the president of Samu-emergencies in France, Dr. François Braun, in an interview with AFP.
Border controls in the EU on the table
"France is in favor of health checks being able to take place at intra-European borders to face the danger of the Covid variant", also indicated Gabriel Attal.
"There are questions being asked about the borders within the European Union and this will be the subject of the discussions which will take place tomorrow within the framework of the European Council", continues the government spokesperson.
"German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned on Tuesday, two days before an EU council devoted to variants, that a reestablishment of controls between EU countries was not excluded if the situation were to arise. degrade ”.
Berlin is particularly worried about the importation of variants of the much more contagious virus, which have appeared in Great Britain and South Africa.
"If countries were to take completely different paths, which I don't see at the moment but which can also be the case, then we have to be prepared to the extreme and say then that we must also reintroduce border controls" , the Chancellor said at a press conference, after eight hours of negotiations with the leaders of regional states which resulted in an extension and tightening of anti-Covid restrictions.
