REPORTAGE
"The vacationers haven't all arrived yet, but it's not bad." After a very busy Saturday on the motorways, which even saw an exceptional peak of 955 km of traffic jams at midday, the weather is fine for the French who are lucky enough to be on vacation. Tourists especially expected this year, due to the consequences of the coronavirus health crisis which cut off a good part of the season.
"It's less worse than we thought"
This is particularly the case in Fréjus Saint-Raphaël, where Émilie, manager of a shop that sells soaps by the sea, has a smile when she sees tourists strolling through the seaside resort. "We expected a little bit better, but it's less worse than we thought. Frankly, it's not too bad. I think it's good to air out, to go out. I'm happy to this start of the season. " A crowd that does not displease either Thomas and his family, who took advantage of the reopening of the air link with Nice to spend a few days with family.
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"It allows you to see people"
"It allows you to see people, it's nice to see something other than the radius [of 100 km] around your home. Because of the confinement, it has been several months since my children saw their great grandmother , these few days will therefore do him good, "he believes at the microphone of Europe 1. Yet among the tourists, not all are as reassured as Thomas, like this woman from the Charentes couple who is worried about the loosening of barrier gestures against the coronavirus.
"Nobody puts their mask on the street"
"I'm shocked, nobody puts their mask on the street. So we restrict ourselves and we only go to the beach. Nobody respects the rules." And she is not alone in worrying about the lack of rigor in the application of sanitary measures. Since fourteen renowned doctors, including the columnist Jimmy Mohamed who officiates on Europe 1, demanded Saturday in a forum "the wearing of the compulsory mask in all closed public places" to avoid that the epidemic of Covid-19 does not start again to the rise.
A collective request which comes at the time of the lifting of the state of health emergency, and while the rate of reproduction of the epidemic has passed above 1 in mainland France, which means that a patient now contaminates more of somebody.