French PM announces new stricter restrictions

Paris, Jan 30 French Prime Minister Jean Castex has announced that the country will impose a series of tighter restrictions from Sunday onwards, including border control, in an effort to contain the Covid-19 pandemic from further spreading.

"We will do everything we can to avoid a new lockdown," the Prime Minister told the media here on Friday after a defence council on the pandemic.

Castex admitted that "the question of confinement is a legitimate one" as "the development of (the virus) variants poses a high risk of accelerating the pandemic", Xinhua news agency reported.

"But we know the very heavy impact (of lockdown) for French people. We believe that we can still give ourselves a chance to avoid it," he said.

In a bid to complement a nightly curfew, which "produces real effects but insufficient", France would close borders to non-European Union countries except for essential travel starting from Sunday.

"Any entry into France and any exit from our territory to or from a country outside the European Union (EU) will be prohibited, unless there is a compelling reason, from 12 a.m. on Sunday," the Prime Minister said.

All visitors from other EU nations would have to show a negative PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test except for cross-border workers, Castex said.

Shopping malls with a surface area of more than 20,000 square metres will be closed, and police controls will be intensified against people breaking the curfew and testing will be reinforced, he added.

"Our duty is to do everything possible to avoid a new confinement and the coming days will be decisive," Castex said. "Let's be very vigilant."

France went into a strict national lockdown from March 17 to May 11, 2020 to contain the first wave of the pandemic.

From the end of October to mid-December 2020, a less strict lockdown was put in place.

On January 16, 2021, the curfew in force since mid-December was brought forward by two hours.

Since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, the virus has claimed the lives of 75,765 people in the country, the seventh highest death toll in the world, with 820 new deaths recorded in the past 24 hours alone.

In the same period, the country registered 22,858 new cases, taking the caseload to 3,212,640.

The number of patients hospitalised went up by 142 to 27,308, with the number of those in intensive care increasing by 19 to 3,130.

Like other European countries, France also faces delays in deliveries of vaccines like Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.

The government predicted that in February only one million people would receive the first of two necessary vaccine doses, after more than 1.4 million in January.

( With inputs from IANS )