There are seven legitimate reasons to leave home under France’s current lockdown restrictions. They can all be found on the government’s official permission form – accessible to print or on your smartphone – which people must carry on them at all times when outside.

The government issued the permission slip to codify the lockdown rules and ensure that the population stay home as much as possible. Police officers patrol the streets and roads to ensure that people comply with the rules.

French authorities have stressed that the time of being outside should be restricted to once a day and never surpass an hour for certain errands like walking the dog or doing some individual physical activity.

This has lead to some confusion as to whether you had to choose between doing your groceries or going for a brief jog, or if on the contrary you could pop by the boulangerie after having taken the dog out for a walk.

As it turns out, you may indeed run several errands at the same time. Ticking off more than one of the boxes on your form is not prohibited, according to French Daily Libération’s fact checking service CheckNews. 

CheckNews put the question to the French Interior Ministry, who said that, to reduce the total number of going outs, ticking several boxes on the permission slip was possible.

Le Parisien reported the same, pointing out that the Interior Ministry in fact had outlined that ticking more than one box and thereby grouping different errands was better than leaving home several times.