John Keiger John Keiger

What explains France’s Covid chauvinism?

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It’s that old Covid chauvinism again. France is in denial about the severity of its new pandemic flare up and possibly a second wave. French news bulletins, but also supposedly authoritative newspapers like Le Monde, have concentrated on how badly things are going elsewhere. In the last few days, Spain was singled out as having reached a new peak of around 3000 positive tests in the previous 24 hours, Britain had hit a similar number. Few mention that France’s numbers were way above that. What is behind this diversionary tactic?

To put it bluntly, as I explained in The Spectator on 5 May, Covid statistics are just international politics by other means. Is mere unconscious bias to blame for French media reports regularly avoiding comparisons of their own far greater number of positive Covid test numbers with other states? 

For over a week, France has averaged around 7000 positive tests per day; on one day this week, it hit 8,500, with positivity rates, hospitalisations and deaths rising exponentially. Yet French media are happy to highlight more favourable comparisons, such as total Covid deaths, where France fares better on the ‘official’ figures at least. The media know that French statistics under-report Covid deaths because official numbers exclude deaths in the home, unlike UK agencies for instance. The official explanation is the time taken for the various state agencies to compute the death certificates filled out largely by GPs in paper format. 

The last update was on 24 August, when France’s national institute for health and medical research, INSERM, totalled a minimum of 1800 Covid deaths at home, but only for the period 1 March to 31 May. But even these three-month old numbers have not been included in state-run Santé Publique France’s daily totals, because they are deemed provisional, despite that organisation saying months ago that it would include them.

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John Keiger
Written by
John Keiger

Professor John Keiger is the former research director of the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge.

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