It’s 14 July, which means it’s Bastille Day, and France has recalibrated its traditional celebrations to suit the times, with a focus on medical heroes rather than the military figures who are typically celebrated.
AP reports that at the main ceremony on Paris’s Place de la Concorde on Tuesday:
… instead of world leaders or other dignitaries, the guests will be nurses, doctors, supermarket and nursing home workers, mask makers, lab technicians and others who kept France going during its strict nationwide lockdown. Families of medical workers who died with the virus also have a place in the stands.
“Exceptionally, this year, our armies … will cede the primary place to the women and men in hospital coats who fought the virus and who remain at the ramparts in the crisis,” Macron said.
Elsewhere in the French capital, though, protesters will be out on Bastille plaza, with medical workers expect to be among those highlighting what they see as French failures to prepare adequately for the spread of the virus.
Updated
at 3.23am EDT
French president Emmanuel Macron will host Tuesday a Bastille Day ceremony scaled-down because of the coronavirus pandemic and also address the French in a rare television interview as fears grow over a potential second wave of infections.
For the first time since 1945, authorities have called off the annual military parade along the Champs-Elysees in Paris that marks the 14 July 1789, storming of the Bastille fortress that launched the French Revolution, AFP reports.
Just 2,000 soldiers – half the usual number– will gather at the Place de la Concorde.
Prominent doctors urged this week that face masks be mandatory indoors, while authorities have warned the virus appears to spreading faster in several areas as people let down their guard during summer holidays.
And despite billions of euros pledged to minimise the economic damage, questions remain over how the government will foster recovery from a recession expected to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs.
The second lockdown in the Australian city of Melbourne will be key to getting contact tracing to a manageable level, an epidemiologist has said, as Victoria struggles to cope with around 5,000 contacts of people who tested positive for coronavirus in the second spike.
Victoria state has seen over a week of triple-digit daily case numbers of coronavirus reported, largely in the Melbourne and Mitchell shire areas.
The state has around 1,000 contact tracers working to identify those who people who have tested positive have been in contact with. Now with more than 1,800 active cases as of Tuesday, it becomes much harder for contact tracers to track down large numbers of contacts, Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, told Guardian Australia.
Health authorities in Thailand are seeking to trace the contacts of two recent foreign arrivals in the country who were infected with the coronavirus and may have violated quarantine rules.
The two cases, an Egyptian military officer and the 9-year-old child of a diplomat from Africa, surfaced as Thailand marked seven weeks with no local transmissions of the coronavirus. With few foreigners allowed to legally enter the country, all other recent cases have involved Thai nationals repatriated from abroad.
That recently arrived foreigners were cleared for entry despite testing and quarantine procedures meant to keep them isolated has caused concern as Thailand considers how and when to reopen on a larger scale to foreign tourists.
Speaking of entertainment, now that UK theatres have been given the green light to reopen, with their share of a £1.5bn support fund in the offing, how on earth can these historic venues adapt to a socially distanced post-Covid future?
For Cameron Mackintosh, the hit musical producer and owner of eight historic theatres in London’s West End, it’s an impossible prospect. “Until social distancing doesn’t exist any more, we can’t even plan to reopen,” he said in June, when he announced that all of his venues would remain shuttered until at least 2021. For an industry that relies on packing people in as tightly as possible to create an electric atmosphere, social distancing is surely its death-knell.
New Zealand and Cook Islands work on ‘travel bridge’ to beat tourism slump
New Zealand’s first travel bubble could be on its way after the Cook Islands’ deputy prime minister said his country was ready to welcome tourist flights as early as next week.
The Cook Islands is a self-governing archipelago in the Pacific, in “free association” with New Zealand.
It has recorded no cases of coronavirus, while New Zealand has in effect eliminated the disease; having recorded no community spread for more than 70 days, meaning any active cases have been limited to arrivals in quarantine.
The Cook Islands is a favourite holiday destination for New Zealanders, and more than 80,000 Cook Islanders live permanently in New Zealand.
In Australia, staff from the private sector including airlines, telecommunications companies and banks, as well as 1,000 additional Australian defence force personnel, will be deployed to help Victoria’s efforts to contain Covid-19 after 270 new cases of the virus were identified overnight.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, on Tuesday outlined the “comprehensive response” required to stay a step ahead of the “wicked enemy” over the coming weeks, including ensuring hospitals are prepared, given that there are 1,803 active cases of the virus in the state.
“That is incredibly challenging when we see the number of cases presenting each day,” Andrews said.
“A bigger team [is needed]. This is a wicked enemy. It is so wildly infectious. It moves so fast. It’s cunning in some respects where people can be infectious for quite some time and not know it – not have symptoms or, if they have symptoms, they’re so mild.”
The state’s chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, said the health system was preparing for an additional 200 hospital patients in coming weeks.
