PARIS (AP) – When the winter sun falls over the Champagne region, the countdown clock begins.
Workers stop pruning the vines as the light fades around 4:30 p.m., leaving them 90 minutes to get out of the cold, change into work clothes, get in the car, and get closer to home. before a coronavirus curfew at 6 p.m.
Forget about any kind of work after working with friends, extracurricular kids clubs, or shopping at night beyond quick trips for basic information. The patrolling police require people seen from outside for valid reasons. For those who don’t have them, the threat of increasing fines for curfews makes life off the weekends not work and useless.
“At 6pm, life stops,” says champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
Trying to defend the need for a third national closure that would further affect Europe’s second largest economy and endanger more jobs, France instead opts for creepy curfews. Large chunks of eastern France, including most of its regions bordering Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, have traffic restrictions from 6pm to 6am.
The rest of France could remain the same, losing an additional two hours of freedom that have been enough for residents to maintain the social life of the bare bones.
Until a couple of weeks ago, the night curfew did not begin until 8 pm in the Prat region of the Marne. Customers still stopped to buy bottles of sparkling wines from their family on their way home, he said. But when the cut-off time was brought forward to 6 p.m. to curb viral infections, drinkers disappeared.
“We don’t have anyone now,” Prat said.
The village where retired Jerome Brunault lives alone in the Burgundy wine region is also in one of the 18-hour curfew areas. The 67-year-old says his loneliness weighs more heavily without the opportunity to have drinks, eat and chat in the early evening with friends, the so-called “apero” encounters so beloved by the French that they hurried, but which were still feasible when the curfew began. two hours later.
“With the 6 p.m. curfew, we can no longer go to see friends for a drink,” Brunault said. “Now I spend my days without talking to anyone except the baker and some people on the phone.”
Imposing a curfew at 6pm across the country is one of the options the French government is considering in response to the rise in infections and the spread of a particularly contagious virus variant that has spread all over. Britain, where new infections and virus deaths have skyrocketed.
Prime Minister Jean Castex could announce on Thursday evening an extension of the curfew, as well as other restrictions, to fight the virus in a country that has confirmed more than 69,000 deaths from viruses.
An earlier curfew combats virus transmission “precisely because it serves to limit the social interactions people may have at the end of the day, for example in private homes,” says French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
Overnight curfews have become the norm in the strips of Europe, but curfew from 6pm to 6am in 25 regions of eastern France is the most restrictive of the 27 nations in the Union. European. Curfews from other countries start later and often end earlier.
The curfew in Italy runs from 22.00 to 5.00 in the morning, as does the curfew from Friday night to Sunday morning in Latvia. The French-speaking regions of Belgium have a curfew from 22 to 06 hours while in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, the hours are from midnight to five in the morning.
People who leave Hungary between eight and five in the morning must be able to show the police a written proof of their employers working or moving.
There are no curfews in Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Sweden, Poland or the Netherlands, although the Dutch government is considering imposing a curfew would slow down new cases. COVID-19.
In France, critics of the curfew at 6pm say that the previous hour brings people together more after work, when they get stuck on public transport, clog roads and buy groceries in a narrow shop window during rush hour. before you get home.
Women’s rugby coach Felicie Guinot says negotiating rush hour traffic in Marseille has become a nightmare. The city in the south of France is among the places where the most contagious virus variant has begun to appear.
“It’s a fight so everyone can be home before 6pm,” Guinot said.
In the historic city of Besançon, the fortified city that was the hometown of Victor Les Hugos ’author, Les Misérables, the owner of a music store, Jean-Charles Valley, says the maximum afternoon means people no longer go to work after work to play with guitars and other instruments he sells. Instead, they rush home.
“People are completely demoralized,” Valley said.
In Dijon, the French city known for its spicy mustard, working mother of two children Celine Bourdin says her life has been reduced to “leaving children at school and going to work, then returning home, helping the children with homework and preparing dinner “.
But even this cycle is better than repeating the closure of France at the start of the pandemic, when schools were also closing, Bourdin says.
“If my kids don’t go to school, it means I can’t work anymore,” she said. “It was terribly hard to be all trapped almost 24 hours a day in the house.”
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Leicester reported from Le Pecq, France. PA journalists from all over Europe contributed
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