The state of health emergency, in place since March 24 to combat the spread of Covid-19, will be extended by two months from May 24. This will allow to continue to decide on possible quarantines and isolation.
The bill to extend the state of health emergency for two months will be presented to the Council of Ministers on Saturday. This will be examined from Monday in the Senate and then in the National Assembly. This must specify the conditions for quarantining and placing infected people in solitary confinement in order to continue in the fight against the spread of the coronavirus.
Quarantine and isolation maintained
The state of health emergency allows the prefect, on the proposal of the director general of the Regional Health Agency (ARS), to decide on quarantine for 14 days and to place in solitary confinement “by reasoned individual decision”. This can only happen”upon arrival in the national territory”or when an infected person, by refusing in a manner “repeated” medical prescriptions for isolation, creates “a serious risk of contaminating other people”. A decision which can, moreover, be challenged and be the subject of “of an appeal before the judge of freedoms and detention”.
This bill also provides for the determination by an information system of those who have been in contact with an infected person. This is provided for in Article 6 which provides that the Minister of Health “may implement an information system for the sole purpose of combating the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic, for the duration thereof or, at the latest, for a period of one year”. Under the same terms, existing information systems can be “adapted”.
An article 6 that raises questions
Health and identification data will be present in these information systems. This aims to “the determination of people infected or likely to be infected, the collection of the information necessary to determine the people who have been in contact with them, the organization of medical biology screening examinations”as well as “medical prescriptions for the prophylactic isolation of people”. As a measure of data protection, these will only be accessible to “only authorized agents”. Thus, in each department, “brigades”as Édouard Philippe announced before the Assembly, will be responsible for identifying the contact cases of people who have tested positive.
The StopCovid application, designed to trace people in contact with an infected person, is still in the development stage and for some article 6 goes further than this application, or even too far. “Article 6 creates a new file that seems more intrusive to me than the StopCovid application was”told theAFP the leader of the Republican senators Bruno Retailleau, for whom the government will have to give “insurance”. He “also asks the Prime Minister to modify this text so that mayors and business leaders know exactly the rules for questioning their liability”he said on LCI.
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