PARIS – After more than a year of lockdown and months of sputtering vaccination campaigns, Europe’s efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic suffered another setback on Wednesday when French President Emmanuel Macron announced new restrictive measures to stop a new wave of death. The move resulted in a third national lockdown for a month that he had long tried to avoid.
With infections rising, hospitals crowded with patients, and the virus now entering classrooms, Mr Macron gave up a three month gamble keeping France open in hopes that a steady pace of vaccinations will make a lockout unnecessary would.
As the coronavirus death toll steadily neared the 100,000 mark, Mr. Macron effectively gave in to scientists and opposition politicians who had been pushing for a new lockdown in recent weeks, adding France to the list of European nations huddled together again. Many of them put in new bans to respond to a wave of new cases where a slow vaccine rollout couldn’t be stopped.
France on Tuesday reported more than 5,000 people in intensive care units for the first time since last April, with bed shortages in hospitals becoming acute in the hardest hit areas. And the slow adoption of the vaccine hasn’t prevented an outbreak of infection, with an average of 37,000 new cases reported per day over the past week.
“The outlook is worse than scary,” Jean-Michel Constantin, director of the intensive care unit at the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, told RMC Radio on Monday.
“We are already at the level of the second wave and are quickly approaching the threshold of the first wave,” he said. “April will be terrible.”
In mid-March, new restrictions were put in place at the regional level to stave off a third wave of infections that affects around a third of the population, including the Paris region. The rules forced businesses that are deemed unnecessary to close, ordered residents to limit their outdoor activities to locations within six miles of their homes, and prohibited travel to or from areas where infections were increasing.
But when the infections stubbornly increased, pressure had built up on Mr. Macron to take stricter measures.
In Le Journal du Dimanche, 41 doctors from the Paris region warned that hospitals could soon be so congested that they will have to decide which patients to save.
“All the indicators show that current measures are insufficient to quickly reverse the alarming contamination curve,” they write.
In late January, Mr Macron took a calculated risk of opposing a new national lockdown in hopes his government could tighten restrictions just enough to combat a surge in infections while people were being vaccinated.
That strategy seemed to work until mid-March, when infections spiked and the vaccination campaign didn’t pick up pace given the mess around the launch of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Political opponents as well as some scholars said Mr Macron had “lost his gambling”.
For Mr Macron, the timing of the announcement on Wednesday was particularly important: the introduction of further restrictions a year after France’s first lockdown and a year before the presidential election, which is expected to leave voters with his presidency after his handling of the epidemic and vaccination campaign judge .
Health officials announced Tuesday that about 8.3 million people had received at least one first shot of the coronavirus vaccine, representing about 12 percent of the total population. The government plans to vaccinate 10 million people by mid-April and 30 million by summer.
But France is still lagging behind some other Western countries in introducing vaccines. According to the New York Times, the UK has vaccinated 46 percent of its population and the US 29 percent.
