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Navigo pass holders in Paris region to get €100 refund

Navigo pass holders in the Île-de-France region can claim back €100 for their travel pass, it has been announced.

Published: 16 April 2020 16:07 CEST

Navigo pass holders in Paris region to get €100 refund

Photo: AFP

With the vast majority of people in the capital confined to their homes, refunds will be available for anyone who has bought an annual Navigo pass or bought a monthly pass for April or May, it has been announced.

Valérie Pécresse, head of Île-de-France Mobilities, has announced that refunds of €75 for an April pass and €25 for a May pass will be available.

The refund is not automatic – Navigo pass holders will have to apply online in a process similar to the one that reimbursed thousands of people after the transport strikes in December.

The online portal is now live here.

The refund is also available to all monthly or annual pass holders – even those who have still been travelling during the lockdown.

Anyone who is still using their pass is an essential worker, so extending the refund to them too is “a sign of gratitude to all those who continue to travel at the moment, and who carry out the essential functions of our country,” she told Le Parisien.

The refund is not open to people with a weekly pass.

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France’s Covid-19 app to be 'put to sleep'

Covid-19 screening in France reaches an important milestone on Friday, June 30th, 2023 – when the TousAntiCovid app is officially ‘put to sleep’.

The app, which was launched in June 2020 as France came out of its first lockdown of the pandemic and has undergone a number of iterations, including as a delivery device for the health pass, will be switched off.

For most people, this anniversary will pass without mention. Few people have consulted the app in recent months, and it has sat dormant on many smartphones since France’s Covid-19 health pass requirement was suspended in March 2022.

Meanwhile, the Système d’Informations de DEPistage (SI-DEP) interface – which has been informing people about their test results since the Spring of 2020 – is also being shut down on June 30th, as per legal requirements.

The SI-DEP shutdown means that it will also be impossible to retrieve Covid test certificates issued before June 30th, should the need arise. All data held by the database will be “destroyed”, officials have said.

It has handled more than 320 million antigen and PCR tests since it was introduced.

This does not mean that testing for Covid-19 has stopped, or is now unnecessary. As reported recently, more than 1,000 deaths a week in Europe are still caused by the virus.

The shutdown of the national information system does not mean that people in France cannot still book an appointment for an antigen test at a pharmacy, or a PCR test at a laboratory. But the number of people going for testing is declining rapidly. In recent days, according to Le Parisien, just 15,000 people in France took a Covid test – the lowest number, it said, since the pandemic started.

Reimbursement rules for testing changed on March 1st, with only certain categories of people – minors, those aged 65 and over, or immunosuppressed patients – covered for the entire cost of testing.

From Friday, only PCR test results will be transmitted to authorities for data purposes, meaning pharmacists that only offer antigen testing will be locked out of the online interface to record test results.

The reason for the shift in priorities is to maintain “minimal epidemiological surveillance”, the Ministry of Health has reportedly told scientists.

As a result test certificates, showing a positive or negative result, will no longer be issued from July 1st. Since February 1st, anyone taking a test has had to give consent to share their data in order to obtain a certificate.

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