Mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi has dropped a bomb, saying he may reinstate the mandatory vaccine pass in August as well as masks on public transport, as Covid cases continue to spike across France.

Experts are warning that France may be entering a seventh wave in the Covid pandemic, as cases hit nearly 165,000 in a single day on Monday. The Alpes-Maritimes’ incidence rate has climbed to 752.6 and the rate in Monaco has hit 501.

These numbers have spurred Nice’s long time Mayor Christian Estrosi to announce at a metropolitan council meeting Monday that the vaccine pass “could be reactivated from 1^st August”.

This bombshell caused a bit of a stir, so much so that the mayor was compelled to explain himself to CNEWS on Tuesday morning. Estrosi said that “the numbers have risen vertiginously” and that “according to scientists, the number of real cases would be 25 times higher than the official figures. The local Environmental Health Safety and Risk Management Agency is daily monitoring the wastewater of the city of Nice and the Covid carriage rate is above 4%”.

With numbers this high at the very start of the busy summer season, concern is mounting that they will skyrocket even more, possibly affecting the start of the school year in September.

This being said, Estrosi insists, “I have no information from the government”, and that he only relies on local findings to base his decisions.

Nationally, Minister of Health Brigitte Bourguignon has “strongly recommended” that the French go back to putting masks on in public transport and crowded areas, however she stressed it was not obligatory.

Estrosi weighed in on this as well, saying that if the situation were to continue to deteriorate, he would impose mask wearing “on the 2,500km of transport networks that I manage,” possible affecting workers crossing the border into Monaco.  

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Photo of Nice by Cassandra Tanti, Monaco Life