PARIS (Reuters) – The French government will impose tougher restrictions for some regions including Paris from this weekend to counter the accelerating spread of COVID-19 infections, spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday after a cabinet meeting.
The announcement paves the way for new curbs in the greater Paris region, where intensive care wards are full and the hospital system is buckling with an incident rate of more than 400 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Attal said the new measures for Paris could include some form of lockdown. Weekend lockdowns have already been imposed on top of a nationwide nightly curfew along parts of the Mediterranean Riviera and some areas of the north.
The head of public hospitals in Paris earlier warned that the virus was running amok in the capital and surrounding departments, an area that accounts for about a third of economic activity.
“The virus is not under control,” Martin Hirsch said.
President Emmanuel Macron had hoped a vaccination drive could stave off the effects of a new pandemic wave triggered by more contagious variants, and prevent France from resorting to a third national lockdown.
(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Matthieu Protard; Editing by Edmund Blair and Hugh Lawson)
