reportage
Covid-19 crisis in France: the day after Macron’s government policy has evolved a lot over the past year since the covid-19 outbreak and its disastrous effects on the French economy – with an overall 8.3 GDP slump throughout the year. From hasty decisions to measures aimed at preserving a fragile but improving economy, there is still one element that has not changed much yet: French people have not recovered their freedoms.
T
he covid-19 crisis, that reared its ugly head in Europe in the month of March 2020, is now celebrating its birthday: we all remember that time when, for the first time in mankind’s history, lockdown measures were enacted a bit everywhere around the globe, in a climate of intense fear due to the outbreak of a new unknown virus which was yet more or less endemic to China at that moment. Since then, the virus has been studied by many scientists and the knowledge about it has considerably improved, as bespeak the `creation of new «vaccines». European governments’ measures gradually took into account these advances, and France did not escape the rule. At the very beginning of the covid-19 crisis, the French government was overwhelmed and - like other European countries - took drastic measures that resulted, for the first quarter of the year 2020, in its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrinking by 5.9 % from January
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