France Finally Moving To Adopt Chinese Methods against COVID-19

PARIS, April 6, 2020 (EIRNS)—In very recent moves, France has dropped its non-strategy to contain the pandemic, and is reorienting towards Chinese methods. It appears now that this non-strategy—no need for masks for people who are not infected, no mass testing except to confirm those with very clear symptoms, and only a partial quarantine to guarantee that the number of sick do not overwhelm ICU capacities—was not determined by any scientific advice, wrong as that might be, but by the total absence of stocks and logistics in the country and government adapting to that shortage.

Under pressure from the medical and other professions, whose members have had to deal unprotected with contagion; from the high body count, now rising after 2,000 dead were found in the nursing and retirement homes; of associations threatening legal action against the government after a March 23 decree approving “end of life” methods against those ill in retirement homes—Newspeak for forcible euthanasia—the French government is beginning to move in a better direction. The roadmap by Jacques Cheminade’s political movement Solidarité et Progrès, published on March 23 and updated since, which has been delivered to all elected officials and public administrations, also contributed to the change.

Following interventions from President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, Health Minister Olivier Veran announced on April 4, that France would abandon the previous credos, and was moving to make masks available to everyone in the population and to have a majority of the population tested for COVID-19. France has ordered close to €2 billion worth of masks, and ordered that test kits go rapidly from the current 12,000 per day to 50,000 in April and 100,000 per day in June. Veran announced that permission was granted last weekend for public and private laboratories, human and veterinarian, research laboratories, and police and gendarme laboratories to start producing the tests.

The government has still to introduce a full China-style quarantine for all those contagious, including the asymptomatic cases, who must be quarantined as well, separately from their families and from those with acute illness, as was done in China. It’s only when all those requirements are fulfilled that France will be able to limit the deaths and move out of confinement.