By lowering the age of children required to use masks from 11 years to 6 years, the government seeks to avoid school closures after the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Classes will resume on Monday, and children will have to use masks in public transport, sports facilities and places of worship, as well as in open spaces in cities such as Paris and Lyon, which recently re-imposed the use of masks in open spaces.
On the first day of the new year, France recorded 219,126 new infections, just a slight decrease from the daily record of 232,200 recorded in the last days of 2021.
The French government believes that the fifth wave of the pandemic, dominated by the rapidly spreading mutated Omicron, can be controlled without re-closure or curfew, which caused economic devastation, and without causing the collapse of hospitals in light of the increasing numbers of infected people with severe symptoms.
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