Second lockdown looms in France as coronavirus rages unabated

France, which is hit hard by the second wave of COVID-19 in recent weeks, may soon need to enter a new phase of confinement, experts warned on Monday.

The number of infected cases is already significantly higher than for the first wave, which drags the country into “a difficult, even critical situation,” said Jean-Francois Delfraissy, head of the scientific council that advises the government on the pandemic.

“We have anticipated a second wave. However, we are surprised by the brutality of what has been happening over the past ten days,” he told RTL radio.

“There are probably more than 50,000 cases per day, it is estimated by the scientific council that we are rather around 100,000 cases per day,” he said.

On Sunday, France registered 52,010 new COVID-19 cases, a new daily record after 45,422 on Saturday. The cumulative total of confirmed cases in the country now stands at 1,138,507, after passing the threshold of one million on Friday.

Seventeen percent of the tests are positive on Monday, up from 16 percent on Saturday, 15.1 percent on Friday, and just 4.5 percent in early September.

Citing the steep increase in infection rates, Eric Caumes, head of the Infectious Diseases Department of Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris, commented that “I think that today we no longer have a choice, we will have to re-confine… There will be no other solution, unfortunately.”

“We will no longer be able to properly treat other patients if the system is saturated with COVID-19 patients. The longer we wait to make the right decisions, the less effective they will be,” he told France Info radio.

On Friday, the number of hospitalized coronavirus patients exceeded 15,000 in France.
According to Karine Lacombe, head of the Infectious Diseases Department at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, “the situation is now out of control.

“We will see how the healthcare system will resist till the weekend. But as it stands, a lockdown will probably be the measure that will have the biggest impact on the saturation of the sanitary system,” she said.

The government has pledged to avoid an expensive lockdown, which curbed the first wave of the outbreak at the cost of an unprecedented economic recession.