The mask will remain mandatory in public transport and the health care in hospitals and EHPAD, from March 14th. COVID-19 is still actively circulating, but the situation has improved a lot in hospitals.
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The most visible symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic that has been in France for two years, the mask will soon almost disappear faces. The Prime Minister, Jean Castex, indeed announced, Thursday, March 3 to the “13 hours” of TF1, the end of the port of the mask compulsory as early as Monday, March 14 “in all places where he is still [applied]”, ” that is to say inside “. Only exceptions: collective transport, where the mask will remain the rule “given the promiscuity” of travelers.
Since Monday, this obligation has already led any longer in places submitted to vaccinal pass such as museums, theaters and movie theaters. But now, we can also do without the mask in shops and businesses, where faces are concealed since, respectively, on July 20 and the 1 September 2020. These measures will also be applied to the School, where the mask will no longer be imposed in the classrooms, nor to the students or the staff of the first and second degrees, informed the Ministry of National Education in the wake. Details will be made in the week of March 7 to 13 at meetings with the unions and representatives of parents.
Other important announcement: the vaccinal pass, in force since January 24, will also be suspended on Monday, March 14th. The health care will, however, be maintained in “health facilities, retirement homes, institutions welcoming people with disabilities who are particularly fragile”. In the same way, the immunization obligation of caregivers will be maintained, unlike the choice made in England to lift this rule for retirement home employees and to abandon the vaccination obligation project for all caregivers.
“This decision arrives too early”
France therefore makes the choice, like most of its European neighbors, to lift almost all of its sanitary restrictions in mid-March, an organ point of a calendar of relief. Measures started in early February. Listened as a liberation by many, these decisions, which intervene on the eve of the candidacy of Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election, however, do not fail to lift questions.
“We have the impression that we want to whistle the end of the match while it is not over,” Yves Buisson, President of the Covid-19 cell of the National Academy of Medicine. “This decision arrives too soon, it would have been more careful to wait for the release of the winter period; it is unnecessarily imprudent”, considers the epidemiologist, expressing two concerns: “the possibility of emerging a new variant” and “immunity against coronaviruses that decreases in time”.
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