The Coronavirus pandemic has impacted the entire world with a violence seldom previously encountered. The human cost is incalculable, and it has also had consequences on States’ political and economic organisation across the world. In the face of the health emergency and a poorly understood danger, they have had to react in unprecedented ways, expressed inmajor slowdown of economic activity and sweeping measures restricting freedoms with a view to limiting the spread of the virus : closing of borders, and limitation of movement of people and goods. In Europe, these measures have jammed the whole machinery of migration, in which the right to asylum is an essential cog. National measures taken by States, guided by the need to invest seriously in finding a solution to the health crisis, have had a violent and extremely dangerous impact on the European system currently in force : the CEAS. Already weakened by disagreement among European States as to how it should be implemented, the CEAS is now confronted with a major health crisis that bars thousands of people from accessing a fundamental right. Although Member States’ national courts have tried – with a modicum of success – to resuscitate the right to asylum affected by the coronavirus, the context has also fostered resurgence of the idea of thoroughgoing reform of European acquis on the subject. It is therefore in the light of the Coronavirus that thought has started to be given to the new European Pact on Migration. Does this mean that its text will incorporate no aftereffects of the disease generated by the virus ? Nothing is less certain.