PARIS: France’s president says he has nothing to be sorry about for refusing to impose a 3rd virus lockdown earlier this 12 months, regardless that his nation is now going through surging infections which might be straining hospitals and greater than 1,000 folks with the virus are dying each week.
Emmanuel Macron’s authorities has burdened the significance of conserving youngsters in class and companies afloat because the pandemic stretches right into a second 12 months.
We have been proper to not implement a lockdown in France on the finish of January as a result of we did not have the explosion of circumstances that each mannequin predicted,” he mentioned late Thursday evening on the finish of an EU summit.
“There will not be a mea culpa from me. I haven’t got regret and will not acknowledge failure.”
For months France has championed a “third method” between confinement and freedom, together with a nationwide curfew and shutting eating places, museums, cinemas, gyms, many purchasing malls and another companies.
Many medical employees have been urging the French authorities for weeks to impose stronger restrictions, notably due to the extra contagious and extra harmful virus variant first recognized in Britain and now dominant in France.
“A zero-virus scenario does not exist and that is true for each nation in Europe. We’re not an island and even the islands who’d protected themselves generally noticed the virus come again,” Macron mentioned.
“However we thought-about that with the curfew and the measures we had, we may cope.”
France has recorded the fourth-highest variety of virus infections on this planet, and among the many highest dying tolls, at 93,378 lives misplaced.
Intensive care items are once more at or past capability in Paris and a number of other different areas due to a brand new surge of critically unwell virus sufferers.
