Doctors and experts say the vacation crunch is just part of a larger web of failures in France's testing strategy -- a strategy that even the government's own virus advisory panel this week called disorganized and "insufficient."
Testing troubles have plagued the U.S. and other countries too. But France's August ritual of fleeing cities for weeks of holiday rest on seashores, mountainsides or grandma's country house is an added tangle. "Closed for vacation" signs dangle from door after door across Paris this month, from bakeries to shoe shops and iconic cafes.
That's worrying news in a country that saw renowned hospitals nearly drown with virus patients in the first wave -- in part because of inadequate testing -- and has already lost more than 30,000 lives to the pandemic. He's particularly annoyed at a blanket government campaign to test 1.5 million Parisians to better understand how the virus is spreading. The free test vouchers were distributed just as dozens of labs shut down for vacation, worsening bottlenecks.
That was too late to stop an outbreak in the town of Quiberon in the western region of Brittany, unleashed by a night club party last month. Authorities urged everyone in the area to get tested -- a mammoth task on a peninsula where the population swells from 5,000 to 60,000 in the summer. Some partygoers were foiled by long lines at a makeshift testing station, and gave up. And the virus spread on.
Some labs have adjusted their hours to stay open late into the evening, or open on Sundays -- both unusual for France.