France’s prime minister Edouard Philippe on Tuesday outlined plans to gradually relax the country’s coronavirus lockdown, in force since March 17, in order to avert the risk of economic “collapse”.
Businesses could reopen from May 11, except cafés, restaurants and large meeting places such as big museums and cinemas, although teleworking should be continued wherever possible for at least the first three weeks, he said.
Local public transport will be largely restored, with the Paris metro and buses set to run at 70 per cent of normal capacity, although the plan is to avoid rush-hour crowding by encouraging companies to stagger working hours. Passengers will be required to wear face masks. Long-distance travel will remain restricted to those on urgent professional or family business.
Schools will reopen progressively, starting with nursery and primary schools and with attendance depending on agreement from parents, and class sizes will be limited to 15.
However, the ending of the lockdown would vary from place to place, Mr Philippe said. Departments would be labelled “red” or “green” on May 7 for the proposed easing of restrictions four days later depending on the local number of new cases as well as on the capacity for testing and receiving patients in hospital.
Mr Philippe said beaches would remain closed until June 1 and that the 2019-20 professional football season would not resume.
“We must protect the French without immobilising the country to the point where it collapses,” Mr Philippe told the National Assembly in Paris. “A little too carefree and the epidemic will take off again; a little too cautious and the whole country will be stuck.”
More than 23,000 deaths from Covid-19 have been recorded in France’s hospitals and old people’s homes since the beginning of March.
“We have never known such a situation in our country’s history,” Mr Philippe said. “Not in wars, not during the occupation [during the second world war], not in previous epidemics. The country has never been confined as it is today.”
The prime minister said a prolonged stoppage of whole sectors of the economy, as well as disruption of education, the closure of frontiers and extreme restrictions on freedom of movement “would mean for the country not only the painful inconvenience of confinement but also in reality the much more serious risk of collapse”.
The easing of the lockdown depended on a triple strategy of “protection, testing and isolation”, Mr Philippe said.
France has struggled to provide enough masks for its health workers and for the general population, a problem the prime minister admitted had aroused “incomprehension and anger” among the French.
But he said that the government was now procuring 100m surgical masks a week for health workers, and promised that there would be enough basic, washable masks for the general population by May 11.
Tests for the virus were also in short supply at the start of the crisis in France, but the government said the aim was to have the capacity to perform 700,000 tests a week by May 11, to ensure that infected people and their contacts could be identified and then quarantined.
Addressing an assembly of just 75 members of parliament in the chamber, with the rest participating remotely in line with social distancing rules, Mr Philippe warned that if the number of new Covid-19 cases did not continue to fall as predicted “we will not end the lockdown on May 11, or we will do it with tighter controls”.
That message was echoed by Portugal’s president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, when he announced on Tuesday that the country’s state of emergency would end on May 3. “The end of the state of emergency does not mean the virus has stopped spreading or that we no longer need confinement measures.”
António Costa, Portugal’s prime minister, said that social distancing and other personal protection measures would remain in place.