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Coronavirus: Emmanuel Macron says things 'happened we don't know about' in China virus handling

Paris, France - French President wants answers as his country's coronavirus death toll nears 18,000, but data shows spread of disease in France has slowed since one-month lockdown.

French President Emmanuel Macron said there were grey areas in China's handling of the coronavirus outbreak and that things "happened that we don't know about", speaking in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday. 
"Let's not be so naive as to say it's been much better at handling this," he said of China's management of the outbreak. 
"We don't know. There are clearly things that have happened that we don't know about."
The United States and Britain took a tougher line on China, where the coronavirus outbreak emerged in December.
"We'll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn't have been stopped earlier," British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said at a press conference Friday when asked about future relations with Beijing.
Raab is standing in for Prime Minister Boris Johnson who is recovering from Covid-19.
US President Donald Trump's administration is investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it does not rule out that it came from a laboratory researching bats in Wuhan, China.
Chinese scientists have said the virus, which has killed more than 140,000 people worldwide, was likely transmitted to humans late last year at a Wuhan "wet market" that slaughtered exotic animals -- a long-time focus of concern for public health experts.
But The Washington Post and Fox News both quoted anonymous sources who voiced concern that the virus may have come -- accidentally -- from a sensitive bioresearch centre in the city.
Trump, asked about the laboratory theory at a news conference on Wednesday, said that "more and more, we're hearing the story" and that the United States was "doing a very thorough investigation."
Meanwhile, France's registered death toll from coronavirus infections rose towards 18,000 on Thursday, but some data suggested the spread of the disease has been contained after a one-month old national lockdown, officials said.
During a press conference Jerome Salomon, head of the public health authority, said the number of people in hospital had declined for a second day running, and that the total number in intensive care units had fallen for the eighth day in a row.
"Our collective efforts demonstrate their effectiveness. The spread of the virus is stabilizing at a high level (...) and that is good news," Salomon said.
Corroborating this observation, senior health officials in Paris - the worst-hit region in France - said there was reason for optimism in the fight against the new coronavirus in view of the number of hospitalisations and admissions to ICU units.
But Salomon said the French health system was still under huge stress and that it was crucial French citizens continued to comply with the lockdown put in place on March 17 and extended to May 11 on Monday.
"The decline in intensive care needs is consolidating, but 6,248 patients in ICU units is a much higher figure than the initial maximum capacity in these units in France," Salomon said.
That number was however at its lowest since April 1 and is down by almost 1,000 from its April 8 peak of 7,148. Before Covid-19 started to spread, France had 5,000 hospital beds equipped with ventilation gear.
At 17,920, the number of fatalities is up 4.4 per cent over 24 hours, with the rate of increase decelerating again after speeding up in the two previous days.
France has the fourth highest tally of fatalities in the world, behind the United States, Italy and Spain. These four countries account for almost two-thirds of the current global total of more than 140,000 deaths.
The rate of increase in confirmed coronavirus cases in France remained steady at 2.5 per cent, with 108,847 cases. In nursing homes however, probable cases shot up by 36 per cent, reaching 37,213.
That took the total number of confirmed and possible cases to 146,606, up 9.4 per cent, against Wednesday's increase of 2.2 per cent.