‘At 6 p.m., life stops’: Europe uses curfews to fight virus
PARIS » As the wan winter 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 after-work 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 secondlargest 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, are living under 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. restrictions on movement. At 12 hours, the curfew is the longest anywhere in the European Union’s 27 nations.
Starting Saturday, the rest of France will follow suit. The prime minister
announced Thursday an extension of the 6 p.m.to-6 a.m. curfew to cover the whole country, including zones where the nightly deadline for getting home hadn’t started until 8 p.m.
French shops will have to
close at 6 p.m. Outdoor activities will stop, with the exception of quick walks for pets. Workers will need employers’ notes to commute or move around for work after curfew.
Those who
have
lived with the longer curfew for the past couple of weeks say it’s often bad for business and for what remained of their anemic social lives during the pandemic.
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 cut-off 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 zones already shutting down at 6 p.m. The 67-year-old 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.
“With the 6 p.m. curfew, we cannot go to see friends for a drink anymore,” Brunault said. “I now spend my days not talking to anyone except for the baker and some people by phone.”
By extending the 6 p.m. curfew nationwide, for at least 15 days, the government aims to limit infections in the country that has seen over 69,000 known virus deaths. It also wants to slow the spread of a particularly contagious virus variant that has swept across neighboring Britain, where new infections and virus deaths have soared.