French Residents infected with corona to be forced to Isolate
Doubts persist, too, within the ranks of Macron’s centrist majority. Former interior minister Christophe Castaner, who is now the lower-house majority leader for Macron’s La République en Marche party, has remained prudent, saying he supports compelling infected people to isolate, but only if doctor-patient confidentiality is respected.
“I’m in favour if we manage to guarantee… medical secrecy, which is the domain of the state health insurer. The monitoring needs to take place within that framework,” Castaner said Wednesday on LCI television.
“If, on the other hand, it’s a file where you or I, if we have Covid-19… find ourselves in a file that is widely distributed, including to internal security forces, to the police, to the gendarmerie for conducting checks in the street, I’m against,” explained Castaner, who oversaw law enforcement as interior minister for nearly two years until July.
Last Friday, meeting carers at a hospital in Brittany, Castex himself displayed scepticism over the notion of mandatory isolation. “I am persuaded that there are people who, if you tell them ‘you have an obligation to isolate yourselves’, they will not get themselves tested,” the prime minister told the healthcare workers.
Healthcare providers divided
Indeed, politicians aren’t the only ones expressing reservations over obliging compliance. Healthcare providers in France aren’t certain it would work, either.
“The interest of mandatory isolation is limited,” Dr Jean-Paul Harmon, a Paris-area general practitioner and honorary president of the French Federation of Doctors (FMF), told the 20 Minutes news site. “I’m not really convinced that passing an additional law, that is coercive, is necessary. People are contagious even before having symptoms, so they contaminate their entourage before they’re tested, [and] so before they are subject to any possible mandatory isolation.”
Macron’s fledgling proposal does dovetail with the appeal that one healthcare collective has been making. The France Assos Santé group represents 85 healthcare-user associations and has been pleading for the government to impose coercive coronavirus measures. The collective wants stricter isolation with “a complete restriction on movement and visits” for those who test positive and the contact cases in their circle. The goal, they say, is simple: To avoid a third lockdown.
Coercive isolation elsewhere in Europe
Legally speaking, “a law that coerces a patient to isolate is conceivable in principle as long as it is limited in scope since the public health objective takes precedence over everything else,” Jean-Philippe Derosier, a public law professor at the University of Lille, told FRANCE 24. “But it is a good bet that coercion, in these circumstances, is less well-suited than efficiently educating the public would be. Similar measures applied in other countries have not necessarily proven effective.”
Mandatory isolation rules reinforced by sanctions have already been put into place by France’s neighbours in Europe, including Switzerland, Britain and Belgium.
In Italy, infected individuals who don’t respect their quarantine restrictions face three to 18 months behind bars and fines from €500 to €5,000. The rules are even more strict in Spain; there, first-time offenders are subject to a €3,000 fine, while someone repeatedly violating isolation rules risks a penalty of up to €600,000.
Greece has the strictest punishment; any infected person found violating Covid-19 quarantine rules – without contaminating anyone else – faces five years in jail. That penalty can rise to 10 years if the offender has infected at least one other person while violating the rules and up to 15 years if that contamination causes death. If the quarantine-breaker infects several people who die, the penalty can be life in prison.
Other countries have gone further in terms of the means in place to monitor isolating coronavirus-infected patients. South Korea has turned to technologies like smartphone data tracing to enforce quarantine rules and has gone so far as to impose that an infected person who hasn’t respected isolation rules be fitted with an electronic monitoring device.
France isn’t there yet. But the attempt to isolate people without coercive measures during the first lockdown in the spring had a manifestly limited impact; the hotels and other establishments requisitioned for the purpose then stood largely empty. Questions also remain over how to tend to infected people’s social connections, considered so important during this difficult period, particularly in terms of the mental health of society’s most vulnerable. All are elements French lawmakers will have to consider in the days to come.
