I just got back the south of France, flying from Switzerland. Myself and my fiancée visited Antibes and its local theme parks. The Pass Sanitai

Postcard from France

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2021-08-18 18:30:13

I just got back the south of France, flying from Switzerland. Myself and my fiancée visited Antibes and its local theme parks. The Pass Sanitaire came shortly before we arrived, so I got to see how it was doing on its first days of implementation.

Polling from the end of July stated that about half of the French are opposed to the anti-pass protests, about 35% are supportive and about 15% are indifferent. How does it look on the ground? I decided to do a simple experiment to find out: always present an expired test even though I had a valid negative one, and see what happens. Over a four day stay I was required to show a valid pass exactly zero times; that includes at the airports in both directions. Compliance is absolutely min viable and often lower. At small businesses enforcement was non-existent: sometimes the pass requirement was ignored entirely, other times we were asked “do you have a pass” and our answer wasn’t checked. One restaurant had come up with a clever way to detect police stings without requiring customers to actually present a pass. As expected, enforcement was stricter by larger firms, however even there we saw the following:

We saw no evidence of compliance checks being done on businesses, although it was only a short stay. We saw only one person voluntarily present a pass when it wasn’t being requested, and that person was unsurprisingly quite elderly.

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