Most of the health restrictions were lifted on Monday, even though SARS-CoV-2 infections have been on the rise for a week. But it is not so easy for the population to abandon the reflexes acquired over the last two years.
Since Monday 14 March, masks are optional in shops, schools, offices, factories and places of culture. The vaccination pass for access to cinemas, theatres, restaurants, fairs, etc. is also no longer required. Only access to health establishments and transport remains conditional on wearing a mask, while the health pass is still required in hospitals and old people’s homes. But the mask will not disappear overnight, just like the epidemic, which is beginning to rebound throughout Europe, and particularly in France, where the average number of new cases per day over the last seven days is nearly 63,000. Hospital admissions are up slightly.
In Herbault, in the Loir-et-Cher region, baker Estelle Warnet has decided to keep a long wall of Plexiglas between her and her customers on this special day, but her blue swimming pool mask has been replaced by a broad smile. “I’m vaccinated and I still have no desire to be contaminated. If I get the Covid, I can’t see who will be able to replace me and the village won’t have any more bread,” she summarises as she spreads out her sausage sandwiches. Habits are stubborn: even if it is abolished, the tacit rule of one customer in the shop at a time persists, and almost everyone shows up masked, including in the line that forms in front of the shop.
“In a medical desert, it makes sense to keep it”
Nearly 400 kilometres further south, in the city centre of Bordeaux, masked and non-masked people rub shoulders in the shops of the Mériadeck shopping centre, as if nothing had changed. At the corner of a department, Katy Pal is surprised, however, that some people do not wear masks. The young Hungarian woman lives between London and Bordeaux. It is difficult to navigate the protocols of the three countries. When she learns that it is no longer compulsory, she takes it off, relieved. But at the checkout, Louis Pagnoux and Thoumi Burnez, salespeople at the Sostrene Grene decoration shop, kept it on all day. A collective decision by the six employees of the shop. “There are still people who wear it, so out of respect for them, we have to keep it too,” they say, even if they admit that most of their customers came without masks.
