Saturday was local elections day in France. I went to the communal building were the election was organized. I expected a deserted place filled with fear and hysteria. To my surprise the carpark was packed with hundreds of cars. Same inside the building with 100's of voters, families, kids. Nobody I saw was wearing a mask.
People were chitchatting (at a normal distance, not the 3meters safety distance) quite joyfully.
In the end, participation rate was 45% (it was 64% in 2014). In France there are 44 millions voters, it means that, compared to 2014, 8 million of them were frightened enough by the "epidemics" to not go voting. But it also means that 20 million of them were unaffected enough by the on-going hysteria to go vote.
Today I went grocery shopping, I was expecting queues, empty shelves, full biohazard suits, it happened to be a great shopping experience
No queue at the cash registers
No queue whatsoever, no jam, pretty empty parking lot.
The supermarket is open, the parking lot is quite empty
A few customers, none of them wearing gloves or masks ( most employees do wear masks). The shelves were 80% full, I found everything we needed: sourkrout, rice, vegetal milk, eggs. A few shelves were empty: some caned food, all the toilet paper, all the milk were gone.
Customers not wearing masks and full shelves
The only disappointment was that I didn't get a fine. In France, people are only allowed to leave their house for essential activities (doctor appointment, pharmacy trip, grocery shopping...) even for these activities they need a written certificate, where they basically write down their name, address and purpose of their trip.
I didn't fill this form and since the government promised 100,000 policemen in the street to enforce totalitarian and meaningless rules I was pretty sure to get fined, which would have been a great memory of the 2020 coronavirus hysteria.
I drove about 30 km and saw only one police car that conducting no control/fining whatsoever. The extensive police control announced by the authorities sounds like a bluff to me.
Police forces are under-equipped, understaffed, demotivated, exhausted by 70 weeks of Yellow Vest protests and overburdened. A few months ago, they were not even able to protect the presidential palace against the Yellow Vests.
Actually the 3 policemen in the above mentioned police car were starring at sheep:
It seems that the local shepherd took the opportunity of the low activity generated by the thoroughly orchestrated hysteria to walk his sheep in the parking lot.