Europe uses curfews to fight coronavirus
As the wan winter PARIS — sun sets over France’s Champagne region, the countdown clock kicks in.
Laborers stop pruning the vines as the light fades at about 4:30 p.m., leaving them 90 minutes to come in from the cold, change out of their work clothes, hop in their cars and zoom home before a 6 p.m. coronavirus curfew.
Forget about any afterwork socializing with friends, after-school clubs for children or doing any evening shopping beyond quick trips for essentials. Police on patrol demand valid reasons from people seen out and about. For those without them, the threat of mounting fines for curfew-breakers is increasingly making life outside of the weekends all work and no play.
“At 6 p.m., life stops,” says Champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
Trying to fend off the need for a third nationwide lockdown that would further dent Europe’s second-largest economy and put more jobs in danger, France is instead opting for creeping curfews.
Big chunks of eastern France, including most of its regions that border Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, face 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. restrictions on movement.
The rest of France could quickly follow suit, losing two extra hours of liberty that have been just enough for residents to maintain bare-bones social lives.
Until a couple of weeks ago, the nightly curfew didn’t kick in until 8 p.m. in Prat’s region, the Marne. Customers still stopped to buy bottles of his family’s bubbly wines on their way home, he said. But when the cutoff time was advanced to 6 p.m. to slow viral infections, the drinkers disappeared.
“Now we have no one,” Prat said.
The village where retiree Jerome Brunault lives alone in the Burgundy wine region is also in one of the 6 p.m. curfew zones. The 67-yearold says his solitude weighs more heavily without the opportunity for early evening drinks, nibbles and chats with friends, the so-called “apero” get-togethers so beloved by the French that were hurried but still feasible when curfew started two hours later.