Race for healing
Reuters team
PARIS (Reuters) – France reported 21,231 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Saturday, slightly above 20,701 on Friday.
The number of people in France who died of COVID-19 infections increased in 199 to 81,647 – the seventh highest number of deaths worldwide – from 320 on Friday.
There were 10,037 new patients hospitalized with the disease in the last seven days and 1,795 new admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) in the period, reported the Ministry of Health.
In contrast to some of its neighbors that are struggling to control more contagious variants, France has resisted resorting to a new blockade, hoping that a national curfew in force since December 15, first at 8 pm and then at 6 pm, will be sufficient to contain the pandemic.
Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told BFM television on Saturday that the French population was at the end of their patience and that a new blockade could only be “the last option when all others have been tried”.
Some scientists, however, believe that President Emmanuel Macron made a bet when deciding against a new blockade, despite the threat of highly contagious variants of COVID-19.
Arnaud Fontanet, a member of the scientific council that advises the government on COVID-19 policy, told Europe 1 radio on Saturday that he feared that the variant first detected in Britain could be responsible for most cases in March.
In the Moselle region of eastern France, where variant cases have emerged, the city has ruled out at least for now the closure of schools or the implementation of a local blockade that had been requested by some local authorities.
The total cumulative number of cases in France has increased to 3,448,617, the sixth largest in the world.