COVID-19: France to impose 10-day quarantine for travellers from India

France will impose a 10-day quarantine for travellers arriving from India in the coming days to prevent the spread of a COVID-19 variant found in India, the country's government spokesperson announced on Wednesday.

This comes as nearly 3 lakh new COVID-19 cases and over 2,000 deaths were reported in India on Wednesday, a record-high since the pandemic broke out last year.

The United Kingdom has added India to its travel "red list" earlier this week, on a precautionary basis after reporting several cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in India.

UK Health minister Matt Hancock on Monday said that the UK has put in place the new variant assessment platform allowing any country in the world to use our genomic sequencing capability if they want to sequence positive cases in order to discover what is happening in their countries.

As per the union health ministry, as many as 2,95,041 new COVID-19 cases and 2,023 deaths were reported in India, taking the total cases to 1,56,16,130, including 21,57,538 active cases.

As many as 1,32,76,039 recoveries have been reported so far, out of which 1,67,457 were reported in the last 24 hours. The death toll stands at 1,82,553.

( With inputs from ANI )