The second wave of the covid-19 pandemic in Europe illustrates the dilemma that governments have faced for several months: imposing a new quarantine and strangling the fragile economic recovery, or tightening restrictions, without any guarantee of stopping contagions.
“In the United States, the holidays of Memory Day in late May and Independence Day on July 4 were followed by contagion spikes,” Frenchwoman Esther Duflo, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, recently said in an article.
Based on that fact, Duflo proposed, to avoid a “catastrophic outbreak” of the disease among the elderly at Christmas, to establish a new confinement throughout France from December 1st to 20th.
“Christmas shopping can be encouraged during the month of November and stores can remain open for orders during the quarantine,” argued Duflo in a column published in the French newspaper Le Monde.
The proposal was not well received by all.
“I don’t know if Esther Duflo has the Nobel Prize for Psychology”, but “a general reconfiguration would mean the country’s collapse”, reacted the president of France’s main employer organization (Medef), Geoffroy Roux de Bézieux.
