Emmanuel Macron places France into second national lockdown

President Emmanuel Macron has announced a second national lockdown of France from midnight Thursday.

An intensive care patient is evacuated from Avignon to Brest by a French Air Force Airbus A400 on Wednesday. Picture: Getty Images

President Emmanuel Macron has announced a second national lockdown of France from midnight Thursday until at least mid-December.

However, he has insisted schools remain open, work continue and aged-care homes allow visitors.

Mr Macron said “we are all taken aback by the pace this virus has spread’’ and that at the current rate, intensive care units would be saturated by mid-November by a second wave worse than the first.

“It may be tiresome and breaking your heart, but in these difficult times we call on your heart and solidarity.’’

He said further measures might need to be introduced at fortnightly assessments of the situation. The country had to reduce new cases from 40,000 a day to 5000 before restrictions could be eased. He said the country had been conducting 1.9 million tests a week but the test and trace system “just isn’t working’’.

He rejected allowing the virus to spread uncontrolled or to ask the most vulnerable and elderly to isolate.

He said people should even wear masks inside their homes to protect relatives as the virus “was mutating into more dangerous forms impacting younger generations’’.

Mr Macron said unlike the total lockdown in March, this time “the economy must not come to a halt’’ and encouraged people to work from home. “What is different is we will have to continue working, all public services construction sites will continue,” he said.

But all shops, restaurants and bars are to close and there is a travel ban between French regions. The external French border is closed except to people coming from other Schengen countries.

On Tuesday, French medical teams detected 34,000 infections and in the past 24 hours there were 524 deaths. These levels have not been seen since April.