PARIS (AP) – As the winter sun sets over the champagne region of France, the countdown clock begins.
Workers stop cutting the vines as the light dims around 4:30 p.m., allowing them 90 minutes to get in from the cold, change their work clothes, get in the cars, and go home. before a descent nest at 18:00.
Forget about any after-work socializing with friends, after-school clubs for kids, or doing any evening shopping beyond quick trips for essentials. Patrol officers demand valid reasons from people seen around them. For those without them, the threat of increasing fines for time-out breaks makes life outside the weekends work harder and harder.
“At 6 pm, life stops,” says champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
In an attempt to address the need for a third nationwide deadlock that would continue to affect Europe’s second-largest economy and endanger more jobs, France is opting for creepy curfews. Large parts of eastern France, including most of its regions bordering Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, face traffic restrictions from 18:00 to 6:00.
The rest of France could quickly follow suit, losing two extra hours of freedom, which were just enough for residents to maintain their social lives barefoot.
Until a few weeks ago, the night state did not start until 8 pm in the Prat region, Marne. Customers continued to stop buying bottles of family-spent wine on the way home, he said. But when the time limit was extended to 18:00 to slow down viral infections, the drinkers disappeared.
“Now we don’t have anyone,” Prat said.
The village where pensioner Jerome Brunault lives alone in the Burgundy wine region is also in one of the nest areas from 18:00. The 67-year-old says his loneliness weighs more without the opportunity to drink early, nibble and talk to friends, the so-called “apero” meetings so beloved by the French, who were in a hurry, but still feasible when the cover began two hours later.
“With the weather at 18:00, we can’t go see friends to have a drink,” Brunault said. “I now spend my days talking to no one except the baker and some people on the phone.”
Imposing an 18:00 national extinction is one of the options the French government is considering in response to growing infections and the spread of a highly contagious virus variant that has swept across the UK, where new infections have grown. and virus deaths.
Prime Minister Jean Castex could announce on Thursday night an extension of the left, as well as other restrictions, to fight the virus in a country that has registered over 69,000 confirmed deaths from the virus.
Earlier coverage countered the transmission of the virus “precisely because it serves to limit the social interactions that people may have at the end of the day, for example in private homes,” says French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
Night extinctions have become the norm in areas of Europe, but the weather from 18:00 to 06:00 in 25 regions of eastern France is the most restrictive anywhere in the 27 nations of the European Union. Instructions in other countries all start later and often end earlier.
The switch-off time in Italy takes place between 22:00 and 05:00, as does the situation from Friday evening to Sunday morning in Latvia. French-speaking regions of Belgium have a coverage time from 22:00 to 06:00, while in the Dutch-speaking Belgian region, the hours are from midnight to 5 in the morning.
People outside 20:00 and 5:00 in Hungary must be able to show the police written evidence from their employers that they are working or commuting.
There are no restrictions in Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Sweden, Poland or the Netherlands, although the Dutch government is considering whether imposing a restriction would slow down the new COVID-19 cases.
In France, critics of the state of competition at 6pm say that earlier hours crowd people more after work, when they crowd into public transport, clog roads and shop in a narrow rush hour ahead to be at 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 one of the places where the more contagious virus has started to spread.
“It’s a struggle so everyone can be home by 6 p.m.,” Guinot said.
In the historic city of Besançon, the fortified city that was the hometown of the author “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo, the owner of the music store Jean-Charles Valley says that the deadline from 18 means that people no longer go after work to play guitars and other instruments it markets. Instead, they rush home.
“People are completely demoralized,” Valley said.
In Dijon, the French city known for its stinging mustard, the working mother of two, Celine Bourdin, says her life has been reduced to “leaving children at school and going to work, then returning home, helping children with homework.” and prepare dinner ”.
But even that cycle is better than repeating the blockade of France at the beginning of the pandemic, when schools also closed, says Bourdin.
“If my kids don’t go to school, it means they can’t work anymore,” she said. “It was terribly difficult to be stuck in the house for almost 24 hours a day.”
___
Leicester reported from Le Pecq, France. AP journalists from all over Europe contributed.
___
Follow the coverage of the AP pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak