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, live under traffic restrictions from 6pm to 6am. At 12 noon, the curfew is the longest of all the countries of the European Union.
From Saturday, the rest of France will remain the same. The prime minister on Thursday announced an extension of the curfew from 6pm to 6am to cover the entire country, including areas where the nightly deadline to get home had not started until 8pm.
French shops will have to close at 6pm, outdoor activities will stop, except for quick walks for pets. Workers will need notes from employers to travel or commute to work after the curfew.
Those who have lived with the longest curfew over the past two weeks say it is often bad for business and for what was left of their anemic social life during the pandemic.
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 areas which is already closing at 18:00. , the so-called “apero” encounters so beloved by the French that they hurried but were 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.”
By extending the curfew at 6 p.m. across the country for at least 15 days, the government aims to limit infections in the country that has recorded more than 69,000 deaths from known viruses. It also wants to curb the spread of a particularly contagious virus variant that has spread to neighboring Britain, where new infections and virus deaths have erupted.
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.
Curfews elsewhere in Europe begin 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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