France mulled imposing a third nationwide lockdown if coronavirus cases continue to keep rising, according to the health minister Oliver Veran on Sunday, as the country braces for a possible post-Christmas spike.
“We will never exclude measures that are necessary to protect the public,” Veran told the Journal du Dimanche. “That is not to say we have made a decision, but that we are watching the situation hour by hour.”
France has been registering around 15,000 new infections per day, confirming on Friday the first case of a new coronavirus variant that recently emerged in Britain.
Veran pointed out that a large number of mayors in eastern France have been calling on him for several days to re-impose nationwide lockdown measures following the Christmas.
France received on Saturday the first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. The doses were delivered to the Paris hospital system’s central pharmacy outside the capital, an AFP journalist saw.
The country announced Saturday the detection of its first case of a new coronavirus variant that was recently identified in the UK.
The data of the French Ministry of Health showed that 20,262 new confirmed cases of Coronavirus were recorded while 159 deaths were registered during the past 24 hours, amid increasing fears of a new wave of the virus in the country.
The total number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 pandemic has reached two million and 547771, while the number of deaths has risen to 62,427, the seventh largest number in the world.
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