The French government will reimpose an evening curfew on Paris, and possibly the greater Paris Ile-de-France region, to tackle the country’s worsening COVID-19 figures, government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Tuesday.
“We are going to reinstate a curfew on Paris, and perhaps the Ile-de-France. The Interior Ministry will specify the details later in the day and an edict will be issued,” Attal told BFM TV.
One Parisian is getting infected with COVID-19 every 30 seconds, while every 15 minutes there is a Parisian arriving in hospital as a result of the disease, health minister Olivier Veran said on Tuesday.
Veran made the comments to RTL Radio in response to demands by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to open up small bookshops and other smaller stores to try to keep commerce and social activity ticking over despite a new lockdown in France.
Veran said any such move was too risky given the high COVID-19 infection rates in the French capital.
“She cannot ignore the fact that every 15 minutes, in the hospitals of Paris, there is someone ill who has been hospitalised with COVID. She cannot ignore the fact that every 30 seconds, there is a Parisian who has been contaminated,” said Veran.
“We want to save the Parisians and the French people and we do that with determination and consistency,” he added.
France reported a record 52,518 new COVID-19 on Monday, while the country’s COVID-19 death toll rose by 416 to 37,435.
