PARIS (Reuters) – Local lockdowns cannot be ruled out in French regions where COVID-19 infections are flaring up even though authorities are striving to avoid it, a government advisor said on Thursday.
“We must do everything we can to avoid local lockdown …In these (risk) regions we could look into further restrictions of big gatherings of crowds,” Professor Jean-Franois Delfraissy, who heads the scientific council that advises the government on the epidemic, told RTL radio.
The situation in about 20 large cities, including Marseille, Bordeaux and the Paris region, was being watched closely, he said.
French health authorities reported 8,577 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the second-highest number of daily additional infections since the disease started to spread in the country at the end of the winter.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Alex Richardson)
