Update from France -
When we had our «sort of» lockdown from end of October to beginning of December, the numbers were over 40k at the beginning of November for quite some time. We were told that we were aiming for cases under 5000 per day to come out of it with no restrictions. That didn’t happen. We dropped to about 11000 (from memory, it may have dipped slightly lower for a couple of days), and then seemed to climb to plateau at around 14000 for a while.
So they released restrictions more than they’d said they would if the numbers didn’t come down, but not fully. Restaurants, bars, cinemas, museums, theatres etc never reopened. They’re closed until at least mid-January, and no one really believes they’ll open then. The original plan was to reopen universities on the 4th January, that seems highly unlikely now. They allowed non-essential shops to open, and extended opening hours and allowed Sunday trading - that’s a huge concession in France, almost nothing is open on a Sunday,
But we kept the curfew, and until 15th December there was a restriction on non-essential travel and we had to have paperwork to go anywhere. The curfew was relaxed on the 24th December, but that’s all. There is no limit on mixing, but the recommendation is no more than 6 adults, and they’ve suggested we cancel plans for NYE. The big thing is that the curfew means everyone stays over when they visit people, so people are in contact for longer overall.
Before Christmas the numbers were rising again, over 20,000 new cases on the 24th and the 25th. But the last few days have been ridiculously low. As a result even the press are drawing attention to the combined weekend/closed labs over Christmas effect, and warning people not to base their NYE plans on the apparent low numbers.
There are calls for local lockdown in three areas: les Alpes-Maritimes, le Grand Est, and Bourgogne-Franche-Comte. Apparently their numbers are very bad. That’s particularly sad for le Grand Est, they really suffered in March too. Apparently the only place with higher new cases than them is Île-de-France, and that has more than twice the population.
There is a defence meeting tomorrow to discuss the plan going forward, and there are more and more ministers expressing concern, despite the low published numbers. I suspect that as the labs reopen and process the tests we’re going to see rocketing numbers.
Though one of the weirdest things I’ve seen was a doctor today saying that people should do a mini-lockdown from the 31st to the 2nd Jan. What on earth he thinks that will achieve I can’t imagine.
Vaccination started yesterday and is already drawing criticism. Apparently at the close of business today (day 2) 55 people have been vaccinated in France 
There was a big thing about an EHPAD (care home) with 330 residents having the vaccine, except it transpired only 12 residents are being vaccinated. Care homes are reporting it’s a nightmare to get consent for the vaccine.
The French are notoriously some of the most resistant to vaccines and, well, proper medicine in the world (love homeopathy and «magnetism» and stuff like that though). They’ve been keeping a running tally of the percentage of people saying they will refuse the vaccine and it’s just climbing. I think we must be at 50% refusal by now. I can check tomorrow. The press gleefully repeating stories like the dosing balls up in Germany isn’t going to help. Even bloody Macron refused to commit to having the vaccine 
talk about leading by example.
Apparently they’re aiming to vaccinate 1.5m people by February, and reporting is positive about this it doesn’t say much for the chances of vaccinating the population.
Anyway... I’ve not posted for a while, so that was a big update, but I saw people asking what was happening here 