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France returns to lockdown

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@snowymum, but it does talk about ideas to persuade the government to let the ski season go ahead - which could be interpreted as meaning that the current default position is that it won't be. Sad
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Weathercam wrote:
@snowymum, fair point, I should have checked the post, but did think the source was reliable.
That's the added complication of "fake news" reports not helping the situation, but as I think we all know we're really not going to know where some of us will be spending Xmas etc


Don't cave to the #coviddeniers Gavin. Today it's been announced the lockdown will continue in some form until next summer to avoid the errors of this autumn.
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@davidof, link?
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https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/coronavirus-les-prochains-jours-seront-decisifs-previent-macron-castex-prepare-une-strategie-jusqu-a-l-ete-14-11-2020-8408338.php
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@KenX, thanks
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I think the restrictions on movement around the country and sport in the open air should be relaxed.

Gathering together in indoor, public venues (bars or even ski lifts... ) I could accept not doing for a while. Not being allowed to meet family, close freinds in a private setting with limited numbers, I think is too invasive of our liberties. Ok for a little bit but not for months on end. is too isolating.
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Meanwhile.....

France lockdown: Petition to relax 1km rule gains support
It has attracted nearly 200,000 signatures and comes amid surprise and condemnation by some that large-game hunting is allowed to continue.

The petition comes amid widespread surprise and condemnation that hunters of large game are permitted to continue hunting during the lockdown.

"Why are scientists, hikers, horse riders or mountain bikers banned from accessing natural ecosystems and not hunters?” rolling eyes
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davidof wrote:
Weathercam wrote:
@snowymum, fair point, I should have checked the post, but did think the source was reliable.
That's the added complication of "fake news" reports not helping the situation, but as I think we all know we're really not going to know where some of us will be spending Xmas etc


Don't cave to the #coviddeniers Gavin. Today it's been announced the lockdown will continue in some form until next summer to avoid the errors of this autumn.


So raising a polite query on the content of an article makes one a covid denier rolling eyes
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Weathercam wrote:
Meanwhile.....


The petition comes amid widespread surprise and condemnation that hunters of large game are permitted to continue hunting during the lockdown.

"Why are scientists, hikers, horse riders or mountain bikers banned from accessing natural ecosystems and not hunters?” rolling eyes


Because runaway wild boar and roe deer populations risk damaging the ecosystem and this is the season for control by hunting/culling.
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A protest above Grenoble last night.



https://www.ledauphine.com/societe/2020/11/13/isere-massif-de-belledonne-un-coeur-lumineux-forme-sur-le-grand-colon-pour-etendre-la-limitation-du-1h-1km-confinement
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@Claude B, class.
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mitcva wrote:


Because runaway wild boar and roe deer populations risk damaging the ecosystem and this is the season for control by hunting/culling.


There is a lot more to it than that. The hunting lobby in France is very powerful - haven't currently the time or will to go into more detail but it involves screwing over the farmers so they could have their fun (sorry, protect the farmer's crops/stock from danger).
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I haven't got time either - but my French farmer mate gets a lot of compensation for crop damage.
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 You know it makes sense.
You know it makes sense.
The Savoie currently has the highest infection rate in France. This despite masks being obligatory in Chambery and Aix les Bains over the summer.

One explanation may be the number of frontier workers bringing Covid back from Switzerland. It is clear (as Gavin said above) that the hospitals are not currently ready to welcome the numerous emergency cases from ski resorts. The region is transferring patients to other areas or even abroad for treatment.

The current flattening of the figures (around 400 people admitted to casualty but a similar number moving out to wards per day) may be attributed to the 2 week half term break when kids were not at school (we are now mid November and the half term break was the second half of October) rather than any specific government measures. It is squeaky bum time for the next fortnight to see if the return to school restarts the infection. In any case medical advisors have warned that easing lockdown significantly over Christmas will lead to a third wave in January and a complete lockdown for February / March.
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Again, no links? Who are these medical advisors?
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The Haute Savoie has overtaken the Savoie as the most infected department in France. 32.8 % of people tested were positive. The infection rate is 933.4/100K compared to 913.7 for the Savoie. Bonneville mayor Martial Saddier has qualified the situation as "dramatic" with 68 out of the 92 emergency beds in the area's hospitals occupied, 54 of them due to Covid. This right before the start of the winter ski season. 532 hospital medical beds out of 661 are also occupied by Covid patients. "There are 12 deaths per day in the department from Covid, the medical staff are exhausted, people need take into account these figures", Saddier continued.
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@davidof, jeeesss that's bad Sad

I concur that there's no way they'll open up ski resorts with figures like that.
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Weathercam wrote:
@davidof, jeeesss that's bad Sad

I concur that there's no way they'll open up ski resorts with figures like that.


How does it compare to the UK? I can see why your Flaine friends are depressed.
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@davidof, The average for England is 248 per 100k. The top 3 out of 315 areas have 727, 720 and 715. The 4th is 632, then it drops into the 500s. The lowest is 42.

The total UK testing rate, since the pandemic began, per million folks is about double that of France.
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chocksaway wrote:


The total UK testing rate, since the pandemic began, per million folks is about double that of France.


Always difficult to compare stats in such cases. Our figures could look better because a lot of people are getting tests, but not necessarily because of symptoms, thus getting a higher % of negatives, or the French might be targeting their testing, thus giving a higher % positive.

Actual is Probably somewhere in between.
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chocksaway wrote:
@davidof, The average for England is 248 per 100k. The top 3 out of 315 areas have 727, 720 and 715. The 4th is 632, then it drops into the 500s. The lowest is 42.

The total UK testing rate, since the pandemic began, per million folks is about double that of France.
I think in recent weeks the number of tests in France and in the UK has been very similar.
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What's the figure for deaths per 100K? I ask because although Switzerland is running at a multiple of England's cases/100K the Swiss death rate is almost exactly the same per 100K. So while a lot more Swiss are getting infected, that's not producing a proportional increase in deaths. Why this is the case is open to a variety of explanations, many of which are plausible but none of which I've seen endorsed by officials.
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@rob@rar, The French dashboard doesn't seem to contain the number of daily tests. But it does give a positive test rate of 17.5% over the last 7 days. The 7 day average of new cases in France is around 35000, which indicates about 200k tests a day. However, the French new daily case rate has fluctuated wildly over the last 10 days so tricky to pin down.

Over the last week the UK has been running at about 365k tests a day.
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@chocksaway, info from the Our World in Data project at Oxford University, who collate information from the public sources in the countries they follow.

The chart shows test data, where it is available, from the start of the pandemic to yesterday, UK and France, tests per 1,000 population, rolling 7-day average.

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@LaForet, A tricky one as the Swiss don't publish deaths everyday. Overall, the UK has a death rate almost double that of CH, since the pandemic began. But on Friday the CH rate was double that of the UK, on Saturday the CH rate was about 60% of the rate.

From what I have heard there are widely differing definitions of a covid death, which is frustrating epidemiologists. Here are my amateurs thoughts that may be contributory factors:
The UK has a long running obesity and Diabetes Type 2 major issue.
Ethenicity, much more analysis needed.
General health service appears to be better in CH.
Population density is difficult to compare.
Both countries are major hubs in World travel.
The Swiss are more disciplined as citizens in my experience.
Last winter was a good flu season for the UK, perhaps meaning we had a larger stock of vulnerable oldies than other nations.
This list could go on@
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@rob@rar, Thats very interesting and their figures show France has been testing more throughouf the pandemic, which is at odds with the Worldometer figures. Not sure we are going to resolve this one easily. Perhaps Davidof has a view from the French press??
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I follow John Litchfield on twitter His number crunching is pretty good

Here is my latest French Covid number crunching thread with some, tentative GOOD NEWS (Hooray!) The flow of C19 patients into hospital and intensive care has slowed substantially in the last week and numbers in IC actually fell yesterday for the first time since 21 Aug.
1/10
Other good news. The positive rate for tests has fallen in the last week from 20.3% to 17.3%. The daily average of new cases has fallen sharply - to 29,413 from 53,344 last week. BUT... (bad news coming) 2/10

The daily mortality rate (most lagging of indicators) has increased once again - to 582.4 from 488.5 last week. There have been nearly 4,000 deaths in 7 days, including 1,230 in care homes. These figures approach those of the darkest days of the 1st Wave in April…. BUT
3/10

It does appear that 2nd lock-down (now 16 days old) - and urban curfews which went before - have slowed the spread of the virus. This offers some home for opening of “non-essential” shops in Dec and – maybe – bars/restaurants for Xmas. (Stirring up the virus again? Sigh)
4/10

In theory, the death rate should start to fall in the next week or so, reflecting the slowing intake into ICU over the last fortnight. I’ve crunched the stats for a 7-day bloc as usual (because one day numbers are often misleading). 5/10

There were 4,871 acute cases in France last night, compared to 4,903 the day before, according to govt figures. In the last week the increase in IC population has averaged 55.33 beds a day, compared to 137.29 last week and 135.3 the week before. https://t.co/6LblfFqOA6

6/10

New cases in the last week have averaged 29,413 a day – the lowest for three weeks. Last week - 53,344. Previous weekly averages 42,985- 38,364 -27,051-20,399-16,035 -12,242 -12,838 -10,520 - 8,630.
It does seem that the curve of the 2nd Wave has flattened and now fallen.
7/10

The death rate is still miserably high, however. Daily C19 deaths in last week have been: 354-932-425-328-1,220-548-270. (Peaks include care home deaths spread over several days).
This makes an av. 582.4 daily deaths. Last week: 488.5. Previous weeks: 416 -345.2 - 236.5..
8/10

There have been 44,246 C19 deaths in France since the pandemic began in March. Almost 25,000 happened in the first 6 weeks in March/April. There been have 12,000+ in the last 6 weeks. The 2nd wave has not, so far, been as deadly as the first. The death rate SHOULD now slow… 9/10

Conclusion: Lock-down, even a messy and partial lockdown like this one, works.
At what price is another question.
Roll-on (and roll-out) the vaccines or vaccines.

10/10
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chocksaway wrote:
@rob@rar, Thats very interesting and their figures show France has been testing more throughouf the pandemic, which is at odds with the Worldometer figures. Not sure we are going to resolve this one easily. Perhaps Davidof has a view from the French press??
I stopped looking at the Worldometer data a long time ago as it seemed to be at odds with other things I was seeing. The OWD data might be wrong, but from what I understand it's a big project which collects a wide range of public policy data and when I compare the UK data they present with the government's own website it seems to be accurate for the UK.
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You know it makes sense.
chocksaway wrote:
@davidof, The average for England is 248 per 100k. The top 3 out of 315 areas have 727, 720 and 715. The 4th is 632, then it drops into the 500s. The lowest is 42.

The total UK testing rate, since the pandemic began, per million folks is about double that of France.


So in the UK we are testing more people yet in France they still have more infections per 100,000 people?
What have they been doing in France that we haven’t done here?
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rob@rar wrote:
chocksaway wrote:
@davidof, The average for England is 248 per 100k. The top 3 out of 315 areas have 727, 720 and 715. The 4th is 632, then it drops into the 500s. The lowest is 42.

The total UK testing rate, since the pandemic began, per million folks is about double that of France.
I think in recent weeks the number of tests in France and in the UK has been very similar.


Ah ok
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Duplicated post


Last edited by Poster: A snowHead on Sun 15-11-20 15:50; edited 1 time in total
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@VolklAttivaS5, Deaths per million population in France in 677 (15/11/20). For the UK it's 761 deaths per million population.
France has done just short of 19million tests, with 1.9 million cases. (65 million population)
UK has conducted 38 million tests, with 1.35 million cases. (68 million population)
There has been a similar increase in Covid deaths in both countries, ..... data from .... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Currently France has 443 cases per 100 000 population
The UK has 251 cases per 100 000 population .......... data from .... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139048/coronavirus-case-rates-in-the-past-7-days-in-europe-by-country/

Currently Austria, Switzerland, France and Italy have much higher rates per 100 000 population. And most probably rising.
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The only fair way to.compare is the cases per 100 000 people, deaths are counted in different ways in different countries.
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I click through from Worldometer to the french health and govt websites. Savoie rate of infection has dropped from over 1000 per 100000 to a shade under 800 as of 11th Nov.

https://geodes.santepubliquefrance.fr/#c=indicator&i=sp_ti_tp_7j.tx_pe_gliss&s=2020-11-05-2020-11-11&selcodgeo=73&t=a01&view=map2
Early on in the pandemic the perceived view was that if the rate of positive tests out of tests taken was under 5% things were under control. The national figure in France has dropped to 17.3%. I think at one time in Savoie it was running at around 30%. On 11th Nov, only 321 tests recorded in Savoie of which 93 were positive(unusually low for mid week - same day the week before it was 2369 with 785 positive ). Not great, even if it is getting better.
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robs1 wrote:
The only fair way to.compare is the cases per 100 000 people, deaths are counted in different ways in different countries.


Cases are counted differently as well. And then there's variance in testing levels etc. e.g. how would you compare a case rate of 50 per 100k in a country with a positivity rate of 20%, with a case rate of 75/100k in a country with a positivity rate of 1%? In my book, the latter will undoubtedly have a lower real rate of COVID.

There isn't a "best" way to compare, there are many alternatives that show different things. I'm currently taking a brief break from regressing thousands of financial datasets in multiple ways, and despite all of them being "right", the answers are very different.
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Dans une interview accordée le 15 novembre 2020, la ministre du Travail, Elisabeth Borne, tout en affirmant qu'il était encore trop tôt pour dire si les stations pourront ouvrir pendant les vacances de Noël, invite les acteurs des stations de ski à recruter des saisonniers, quitte à recourir ensuite au chômage partiel.
C'est un message d’encouragement, qui laisse à penser que nos appels sont entendus et que la saison se fera bien, même si c'est avec retard.

In an interview on November 15, 2020, the Minister of Labour, Elisabeth Borne, while confirming that it was still too early to say whether resorts will be able to open during the Christmas holidays, invites the actors of the ski resorts to recruit seasonal workers, even if it means resorting to partial unemployment.
It’s a message of encouragement, which suggests that our calls are being heard and that the season will go well, albeit late.

From the Mairie. Not much but something I guess.
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@snowymum, although to be fair to @Weathercam, the article is pretty pessimistic about the current and likely situation at Christmas; I would not fancy being helicoptered to Brittany from Savoie/Isère's pistes wink
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Claude B wrote:
Dans une interview accordée le 15 novembre 2020, la ministre du Travail, Elisabeth Borne, tout en affirmant qu'il était encore trop tôt pour dire si les stations pourront ouvrir pendant les vacances de Noël, invite les acteurs des stations de ski à recruter des saisonniers, quitte à recourir ensuite au chômage partiel.
C'est un message d’encouragement, qui laisse à penser que nos appels sont entendus et que la saison se fera bien, même si c'est avec retard.

From the Mairie. Not much but something I guess.


Honestly it means nothing really. Hire your season workers then lay them off and the govt. will pick up the slack - which they are doing anyway for people who haven't been employed.

At the moment we have no idea if the ski resorts will open in France and if so, under what circumstances. Certainly with the current hospital situation in the Rhone-Alpes it would be irresponsible to have dozens of A&E cases coming in daily to the region's hospitals adding to current woes but there are 5 weeks to Christmas still. Opening beyond local skiers would also add to the risks of Covid spread - every winter we have gastro/flu epidemics in the region brought by tourists so no reason to suspect that Covid would be different.

It is also hard to believe that resorts won't open at all during the whole winter but who would have thought that airlines, cinemas and restaurants would be sacrificed? As for Christmas, logic would say no, it would create a 3rd wave in January/February. At the same time it is around 25% of resort turnover in a normal season.
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I'm going for resorts opening on the 18th of December! This is based on nothing at all, just guessing like the rest of us.
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Snowsartre wrote:
@snowymum, although to be fair to @Weathercam, the article is pretty pessimistic about the current and likely situation at Christmas; I would not fancy being helicoptered to Brittany from Savoie/Isère's pistes wink


Not sure what point you are trying to make. I was not disagreeing with Weathercam about the challenges facing the start of the season.

The start of the season seems uncertain and I don't think anyone will be given a choice of being airlifted to Brittany. Either the numbers in hospitals will go down enough that resorts can open or I assume things will be delayed. It seems too early to know what will happen to the season as a whole.
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