On COVID Frustration
Now that we have been living in this pandemic for over a year, I feel like I can write a blog post about it. There’s a lot that’s different about living in France vs. America during the pandemic, but today on this Monday as cases SOAR in France I would like to discuss frustration a bit.
I remember arriving to France in October and being excited to enter a country where it seemed like they had a handle on the situation. This belief was mainly based in the fact that they had a competent leader unlike us at the time. But I also knew Europe had somewhat opened for travel for the summer, cases were decently low throughout the summer and early fall, and I felt confident going to a country that has free universal health care and what seemed to be a good policy.
When I arrived, I was a little surprised at how little people social distanced, the amount of incorrectly donned masks I saw, and the fact that indoor dining continued unregulated (and outdoor for that matter). After three and a half weeks in France, this lackadaisical and unclear governing policy came to a peak and France shut down again. While the US never fully shut down in the same way that most of Europe and Asia did in the spring, things did kind of come to a screeching halt in March/April. It was hard to reconcile the fact that France was pausing again but the US wasn’t. But I felt okay about the strategy because cases were rising in the US and how long is a month really? Plus this lockdown promised way more freedom than the last.
After four weeks, the government changed restrictions slightly. Following a spike in cases from the holidays, France went into a nationwide curfew beginning at 6 PM until 6 AM. Stores were allowed to remain open and you no longer needed an attestation to leave your residence within the curfew hours, but restaurants and bars were still closed for dining / drinking in. The 6 PM curfew didn’t seem too bad at first, largely because January is cold and it gets dark at 4:30. There was hope of a change in February, to no avail. February things stayed exactly the same. The usual gossip of reentering confinement and potentially closing the schools for a few weeks abounded, but nothing came of it.
At the same time, not only did the US get a new president who recognized the severity of the pandemic, but vaccines began rolling out there rapidly. On the other hand, France’s vaccine supply was and still is not only limited due to sharing with other EU countries and exporting abroad, but fewer were approved. This is where I started to get really frustrated with the whole situation. Even though schools remain open in France, teachers are still not eligible to get vaccinated. Regardless of a pandemic, teachers are some of the most tireless and thankless workers in the world. On the other hand, I saw all of the people I know who teach in the US begin to get vaccinated. While I know the rollout has varied greatly by state, a large portion of my network is based in the tri-state area and they seem to have had a great vaccine program.
While all of this is happening, I am still going to lunch with my teachers every day, who fall on two sides of the spectrum. There are the teachers I work with who are anti-vaccine and will think of any reason to not get it, and the teachers I work with who are disappointed with the government’s priorities and feel forgotten. When I shared that my grandparent’s had been vaccinated in February, they were all shocked.
Now it’s the end of March, and it feels like we’re stuck in a limbo here. Paris and a few other regions have just reentered confinement-lite, and while they moved the curfew in the rest of France back an hour to 7 PM to account for Daylight Savings, cases are exponentially rising and bars and restaurants show no signs of opening. Today, I realized that many places in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue and Avignon have literally not been open in just over 5 months. It’s insane. And it’s exhausting.
It’s exhausting from a few different perspectives, and while I don’t want to complain because I do still get to live in France, the vastly different trajectories France and America are on with respect to the pandemic are taking a toll on me. While I readjusted my expectations of normalcy by December when we reconfined in October, I thought maybe by the spring with warmer weather we’d be rounding a corner. I was and remain wrong. It has been truly so weird to see people in America continue to travel, eat out, party in large groups, and generally seem to disregard the pandemic. On the other hand, my experience here has been one that is largely dictated by government rules and so even if I wanted to go out and have some sense of the old times, I wouldn’t be able to. Yet now that vaccines are more widespread, I feel myself growing increasingly jealous of the sense of normalcy returning to America - people can start traveling and eating out again safely. On the contrary, France is facing a third or fourth wave (depending on how you’re counting) and things do not seem to be slowing down. The tables have majorly turned. I not only find myself jealous, but also stuck. It feels like as America opens up, France is closing down more and more.
I feel badly complaining on the one hand because I know this is the opportunity of a lifetime, but I also not only feel a need to vent but to discuss the situation in France. COVID rules and regulations are hard to follow as is, but to follow amongst two countries is downright impossible. I just want to remember not only how I’m feeling, but also the specific frustrations and rules I’m dealing with.
