France will lift a six-week-long nationwide coronavirus lockdown on December 15 but impose a curfew from 8pm, including on New Year’s Eve, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced Thursday, news agency AFP reported.

Castex said that families would be allowed travel to celebrate Christmas together but said that museums, theatres and cinemas would remain closed for an extra three weeks as the number of new COVID-19 infections begins to slowly rise again.

Castex said the situation had “considerably improved” since France entered a second lockdown on October 30, noting that the number of new infections had fallen from nearly 50,000 a day in late October to around 10,000.

But the decline “has slowed over the past several days,” he said.

“We’re on a sort of plateau,” Castex said, warning that if the French dropped their guard they could face a third lockdown in the months to come.

The curfew to take effect on Tuesday will last from 8 pm to 6 am, with the exception of December 24, when families are invited to celebrate Christmas, but with no more than six adults per household.

Health Minister Olivier Veran admitted that France would fall far short of its goal of a maximum 5,000 new cases per day by Tuesday, when the lockdown ends.

On Thursday, the country recorded nearly 14,000 infections over the previous 24 hours, compared with 12,000 a week earlier.

“We have still not exited the second wave” of the epidemic, Veran said.

President Emmanuel Macron had initially conditioned lifting the lockdown on the 5,000-cases level being met but revised his stance to afford the French some relief after weeks of seclusion.

The restrictions were partly eased on November 28, when businesses selling “non-essential” goods and services, such as bookshops and hairdressers, were allowed to reopen.

But bars and restaurants remained closed and people still needed to fill out self-signed permission forms to leave their homes.

The total death toll in France since the beginning of the pandemic stands at over 55,000.