President Emmanuel Macron will announce on TV at 8pm (Fr time) tonight whether France is going into a new Covid lockdown. Drastic action of some kind is certain after alarming figures in the last few including 523 deaths yesterday, the highest daily toll since late April. 1/10

I’ve brought forward my weekly thread by a couple of days to show the trends, rather than the daily peaks and troughs. It is clear that the curfews imposed on French metro areas 11 days ago are having little effect on the spread of the virus. 2/10

Even more disturbing are the relentless increases in acute cases and the death rate. The days are gone when this could be seen as a relatively gentle 2nd wave – even though deaths/IC cases aren’t yet exploding as they did in March/April 3/10

I’ve crunched the figures back for 7 days, even though there are only 5 new sets of stats since my last thread. They show a disturbing acceleration of acute cases and especially deaths in the last week. 4/10

The ave. daily C19 mortality in France in the last 7 days was 236.5 - compared to 155 in my last thread. In previous weeks it was 94.5, 62.7, 81.7 and 74.7.
Yesterday’s mortality figure – 523 – is highest since circa 21 April, suggesting even worse news in the days ahead. 5/10

The avge. number of C19 cases in the last 7 days was 38,364, with a new peak of 52,010 on Sun. Last week it was 27,051. Earlier 7-day averages were 20,399- 16,035 -12,242 - 12,838. In early August it was 500.
The positive rate for tests is 18.4% - compared to 4% in Aug. 6/10

There were 2,918 Covid cases in intensive care in France last night – which is approaching 60% of “normal” ICU capacity (leaving aside other acute cases). The pressure on IC is now growing by an average 105.8 patients a day, compared to 74 last week and 57.3 before that.
7/10

Macron is meeting the PM and senior ministers in a “health defence council” this am to decide what to do next. There are 4 options on the table, including a return to the nationwide lockdown of 17 March. Schools may be excepted; there may be a “short” lockdown of 2 weeks. 8/10

Other, less drastic options include local lockdowns or longer curfews for Paris and other metro areas and weekend-only lockdowns (to allow the economy to function more normally in the week ). 9/10

Who is to blame? I suppose we all are. We dropped our guard from August onwards. Something similar is happening across Europe, even in Germany. But the French government’s record on test and trace etc has been frankly woeful. 10/10