France reports 25,387 new Covid-19 cases, 296 deaths

Paris, Feb 11 : France on Wednesday confirmed 25,387 Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, the highest daily total in a week. The country is facing a high risk of a rebound in the epidemic as more contagious variants of the virus continue to circulate, health authorities said.
France’s cumulative number of confirmed infections has grown to 3,385,622, while the number of coronavirus-related deaths reached 80,443 after another 296 patients died in one day, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Currently, 27,461 people are hospitalised, including 3,319 in intensive care. The two tallies decreased by 216 and 23, respectively, within a day.
In Ile-de-France (Paris Region), the country’s most populated zone and its main economic hub, 39 percent of the positive tests are attributable to the Covid-19 variant first detected in Britain, warned Gilles Pialoux, head of the Infectious Diseases Department at Tenon Hospital in Paris.
“We have an incredible surge of the variant in Ile-de-France… We have clusters mixing caregivers and patients,” Pialoux told media early on Wednesday.
“The situation is alarming for several reasons. First, we cannot predict the path of these variants and we are very late in France with sequencing. And there are clusters in hospitals, which means bed closures and staff eviction,” he said.