France has caught the covid blues

It’s 6 PM. The sun is still shining and temperatures have risen into the 50’s. I’d love to go outside but instead, I’m standing at my living room window and I’m not the only one. Across the street, in a big apartment building that towers over mine, others stand. Some peek out from behind a curtain; others throw their windows open, lean out, and stare at the street below.

 Why are we all here, as if on cue? What are we looking or waiting for? The answer is “nothing.” It’s curfew time. Since January 16^th, all over France, we are supposed to be in for the night by 6 PM. Yearning draws us to our windows. Traffic is still heavy, mostly busses and taxis; a few lone pedestrians carrying grocery bags hurry through the streets. The night may still belong to lovers but, at least for the moment, it doesn’t belong to anyone who forgot to buy a quart of milk or a pack of cigarettes. And forget about a moonlight stroll.

Last evening, at about 5:45, I heard whistles blowing in Buttes Chaumont Park, a few steps from my Parisian apartment. The guards were emptying it of joggers, strollers, and parents with children running free in the park’s playgrounds. Earlier, outside the local Monoprix, the biggest neighborhood supermarket, late-afternoon shoppers stood outside, waiting in line because the number of shoppers inside was at covid capacity.

In a smaller market in a nearby street, there was a police raid earlier this month. Instead of locking the doors at 6 PM sharp, checkers were still scanning the purchases of shoppers who, in many cases, work till almost curfew time and then have to buy food before returning home for the night. Police sources claim the store, called Franprix, had already been warned. Those waiting in line to check out received a 135 euro fine—that’s about $165 for shopping five minutes beyond curfew time.

We can also receive a fine for not wearing a mask in public. I’m used to mine and put it on before I leave the apartment. I won’t say I like it, but in my present disheveled state—I haven’t had a haircut in months, the more I cover up the better. But not wearing glasses gets to me. Since my return to Paris, I leave them at home when I go out. I no longer drive and I prefer being nearsighted to observing urban life through a heavy layer of steam.

Until January of this year, I experienced the covid pandemic in the country. When I walked in the streets or in the woods, I rarely crossed another person. When I shopped for food, I went to what the French call a “hypermarché,” a supermarket about the size of your average Walmart. Shoppers steered their carts clear of each other. I felt safe and though I wore a mask in the store, I never put one on in the car.

In Paris, even with crowd control, shoppers rub elbows and even breathe down each other’s necks. It has taken some getting used to. And now that the UK variant, highly contagious and perhaps more deadly than previous forms of the virus, is getting the upper hand in the Paris region, I’m never too impatient to go outside.

In all of France, restaurants, cafés, theaters, museums, cinemas, gyms, stadiums, funeral parlors and crematoriums, discothèques, conference centers, circus tents and even outdoor sports facilities remain closed. The official government list is actually much longer. Since January 31^st, shopping centers have been partially closed, with the exception of groceries and supermarkets. 

To tell the truth, after 6 PM, there’s not much to do in France.

To tell the truth, France is not doing so well with the covid pandemic at this time. Each day there are between 20 and 25,000 new cases, as compared to 50 to 60,000 in the US, with a population 5 times greater. There are 27 deaths per 100,000, compared to 24 in the US. At this date, about 3% of France’s population has been vaccinated, and many of those over 75 do not yet have a vaccination date. There are not enough vaccines to go around, a problem the US, with 13% of the population vaccinated, is encountering as well. Both President Biden and President Macron announce that by summer’s end, those who wish to be vaccinated will be, but as the French say, “Wait and see.”

For a little over a year, we have been living with this virus. Everywhere in the world, people’s lives have changed. I know I’m among the lucky ones. First of all, I’ve not caught Covid-19. I’ve been spared its immediate and long-terms symptoms.

Since retiring, I have also escaped the grueling working conditions of teachers in France. Fom nursery school to high school, teachers have been pretty much continuously on the job since last year’s springtime quarantine came to an end. France’s Minister of Education has made a priority of keeping schools open.

University students, however, have been kept out of the classroom and my former colleagues spend their days glued to a computer screen, teaching on-line, correcting on-line, mostly without tech support, often using all their own material. Last fall, when universities were open, the number of covid cases soared. France went into a short-term quarantine in late October. When it ended, universities remained closed. 

Since that time, suicides have been on the rise among the young, and many students now depend on food banks to eat because, with so many sectors of the French economy shut down, they cannot find parttime work. Yes, because of covid, youth is truly being wasted on the young. They can’t even take advantage of it!

Everyone in their own way must yearn for a “return to normal.” Those of us who come to our windows at curfew time would like to step outside after 6 PM. We’d like to take off our masks, sit at a neighborhood café, or, luxury of luxuries, have dinner in a restaurant, simple pleasures too long denied.

Yet “normal” will not be coming back any time soon. It may not come back at all. Our world has changed, and covid is not the only cause. The question then becomes how we ourselves are going to have to change. That’s something I think about each evening at curfew time.

       On a balmy winter weekend, a lucky few escape the city for nearby beaches in Normandy.