You Staying at Home Is the Future Unvaccinated-Punishers Want

When it's been a good long while, you forget one of the primary benefits of travel: seeing and experiencing wholly different approaches to the same human problems we contend with back home. For my 6-year-old in France the first half of August, that meant mostly one thing: Kids of elementary school age there almost never wear masks.

"Can we stay in France until coronavirus is over?" she asked, more than once.

To be sure, that's not the French COVID-19 policy making international headlines this summer. In July, President Emmanuel Macron announced that everyone in the country as of August 9 must show a government-issued Pass Sanitaire—proof of either vaccination, a negative test within the past 72 hours, or prior recovery from an infection—before doing most anything in an indoor public space. Cities have been wracked with protests every weekend since; vaccinations have also shot upward.