PARIS: France’s health minister Olivier Veran said on Tuesday the country was regaining control over the coronavirus but was not ready to ease the second national lockdown imposed to rein in the disease.
After curfew measures applied in major French cities in mid-October failed to produce the results the government had hoped for, it enforced a one-month lockdown on Oct. 30, though it was less strict than the one that ran from March 17 to May 11.
“If we let up our efforts too early, if we are less compliant with the lockdown, we might be subject to a new epidemic surge that would undo all the hard work done by the French people for several weeks,” Veran told BFM TV.
After hitting a peak of 86,852 new infections per day on Nov. 7, the rate has dropped sharply with the total reaching a more than one-month low on Monday, at 9,406.
However, the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 has reached an all-time high of 33,497, even though the seven-day moving average of additional hospitalizations, presently at 339, has steadily gone down since the beginning of the month, when it peaked at more than 1,000.
These positive trends, acknowledged by Veran on Monday, have led to calls to start loosening the lockdown as soon as possible.
Shop owners want to be allowed to reopen for the Nov. 27-29 “Black Friday” discount weekend. They have been struggling to compete against giant online retailer Amazon, which is continuing operations throughout lockdown.
But Veran dismissed the idea.
“Things are faring better but it is of utmost importance not to change course. I want us to be efficient in the long run,” he said.
With almost two million cases, France has the world’s fourth-highest number of infections, behind the United States, India and Brazil. Its death toll, at 45,054, is the seventh-highest globally. (Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten and Sudip Kar-Gupta; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Ed Osmond)
France regaining control over coronavirus, says health minister
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France regaining control over coronavirus, says health minister
- Veran said the virus was circulating a little less rapidly than at the start of the curfews
- France enforced a one-month lockdown on Oct. 30
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
