(Xinhua) — France recorded 20,701 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, down from 21,063 the day before and 25,387 on Wednesday, according to the country’s health authorities.
Data showed a total of 3,427,386 people in the country have been infected with the coronavirus so far, of whom 81,448 had died.
Over the last seven days, 10,079 patients with COVID-19 were hospitalized, including 1,767 on ventilators.
The highly contagious variant of the COVID-19 virus first detected in Britain represents a quarter of all new infections in France, while the new virus strains identified in Brazil and South Africa account for up to 5 percent of the country’s total positive cases.
In Moselle, eastern France, the new variants infect 100 people per day, according to Health Minister Olivier Veran, who visited the area Friday afternoon.
Some clusters have been identified in hospitals and nursing homes, while many infections were not connected to travel from South Africa and Brazil, he added.
Veran called on any inhabitant in the region who tests positive to self-isolate for 10 days instead of one week, pledging to ramp up tests and vaccination for vulnerable people.
As speculations over a local lockdown to curb the spread of variants is mounting, government spokesperson Gabriel Attal told Europe 1 radio that “everything is possible, nothing is excluded.”
“What is needed is to take the most appropriate measures to control the spread of these variants,” he said. “If there are measures to be decided at the local level, they will be taken.”
Attal added that the number of coronavirus cases has plateaued at high level but started to decline “even if the variants are changing the situation.”
Since late December, when France launched its vaccination campaign, over 2.22 million people have received the first dose of the vaccine, and 617,715 have had the two shots, Health Ministry’s figures showed.
As the world is struggling to contain the pandemic, vaccination is also underway in some other European countries with the already-authorized coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 242 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide — 63 of them in clinical trials — in countries including Germany, China, Russia, Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on Tuesday.
