Lascours Lockdown, Day 683

Wednesday, January 26th. 

Maëva administered her D4 test all by herself. It was negative. 

This afternoon at the teacher training college, my colleague was mysteriously absent, so I agreed to take both groups of students at the same time again, after I teased them about their misuse of modal auxiliaries and they promised to bring me cake next week in return. As a result, I got done early enough to go pick up my new shoes (the brown leather platform t-straps) and still be home in time for 6pm yoga. Only later did I learn that my colleague recently lost her mother and had thought we had been informed of her absence.

I had tentatively set today as the day to end my "Lascours Lockdown" series. It has been two weeks since the girls received their second dose of Covid vaccine. However, with 10% of the French population having tested positive for Covid since the beginning of January, and our lives still significantly impacted by the pandemic (Maeva still out of dance, the girls still not returning to the cafeteria, and Sylvain and I still actively avoiding certain types of indoor mask-offing activities), it just doesn't seem like things have settled enough for it to be appropriate to stop, given that the goal of the series has been to chronicle the effects of the pandemic on our lives. People here are beginning to talk about entering a second phase of the pandemic with Omicron that may soon be an "endemic," rather than a pandemic. However, as long as the hospital system continues to be overwhelmed, and they're predicting that to last into March here, it still seems to me as though we're in a critical phase.

In an effort to encourage vaccination of 5-11s, the government has walked back the two-parent consent policy enacted January 6th. It is now possible to get your child vaccinated again with just one parent's signature. Only 200,000 of 5 million elligible kids have been vaccinated this month. 

The government has also announced a new policy of providing 10 home tests per month to teachers and school staff. That should apply to Sylvain. I don't know whether university staff will be included.