Adopting martial language, President Emmanuel Macron ordered the French to stay at home for at least the next 15 days, as France put in place some of the most severe measures in Europe to try to curb the raging coronavirus.
The aggressive move by France came as other countries in the region introduced measures that their leaders described as unprecedented in postwar Europe, and as the European Union proposed a 30-day shutdown of all nonessential travel into the bloc from other countries.
The movement of French citizens will be tightly restricted, starting from midday on Tuesday and lasting through at least the end of the month, with people expected to stay home, leaving only for essential activities like food shopping. Anyone violating the order faces punishment.
“We are at war,’’ Mr. Macron said in an address to the nation Monday night. “The enemy is invisible and it requires our general mobilization.” The French army will deploy to transport the sick to hospitals, and a military hospital with 30 intensive care beds will be set up in the eastern region of Alsace, where one of the largest infection clusters has erupted.
Mr. Macron was responding to severe warnings from doctors about an increasingly dire situation. Jérôme Salomon, a top official at France’s health ministry, told France Inter radio on Monday that the situation in France was “deteriorating very quickly.” We are seeing that the number of cases is doubling every three days,” Mr. Salomon said. “There are hundreds of serious cases this morning in France’s intensive care units,” he said, adding that authorities were worried that the speed of the epidemic could provoke a “saturation of the French hospital system, which we absolutely want to avoid.” Walls are being raised and mass quarantines enforced across Europe to combat the spread of the coronavirus, with Germany the latest to partly seal its borders, banning entrants from France, Switzerland and Austria from Monday.
More than 100 million people across the continent are on lockdown after Spain announced it would follow Italy in confining citizens to their homes for 15 days unless they had to buy food or medicine, go to work or seek medical treatment. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a new raft of measures to minimize social contact: Religious services will be banned, and bars, clubs, discothèques and brothels shut. Restaurants will be allowed to open but only until 6 p.m., with wide spacing among diners, and hotels are being asked not to accept tourists. Schools across Germany were preparing for a prolonged shutdown.
Even if some criticized Germany’s response as slow, Ms. Merkel said that the measures were wide-reaching and an infringement on personal freedoms implemented only reluctantly. “In the 70-year history of the German Federal Republic, we have never had to do what we must do now,” the chancellor said.
The number of infections in Germany continued to climb rapidly, reaching 6,400 by Monday, but the fatality rate remains notably low: Only 16 people have died of the virus so far.
The proposed travel ban into the European Union, which could be extended beyond 30 days, was vital to keep the internal borders of the bloc — and the so-called Schengen free-travel zone — as open as possible to promote European solidarity and to help the Continent’s economy, which appears to be heading into a recession, said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The less travel, the more we can contain the virus,” Ms. von der Leyen said, after a discussion on Monday with Group of 7 leaders, including President Trump, in which they agreed to coordinate research into the new disease and their social and economic responses to it. The travel ban must be approved by the 27 member states, but Ms. von der Leyen said that there was strong support for the proposal, which will be decided on by the leaders of the bloc on Tuesday in a teleconference.
The proposal is an effort by Brussels to unify border practices after numerous member states have unilaterally shut themselves off to try to avoid further infection from travelers from where the infection rages, like Italy.