The renewed spread of coronavirus in France could become harder to control without a collective effort to stop a rise in the infection rate, its prime minister said on Tuesday.
The public was becoming careless, Jean Castex warned, after official data recorded nearly 5,000 new Covid-19 cases from Saturday to Monday. The epidemic has now killed more than 30,300 people in France.
"If we don't act collectively, we expose ourselves to the heightened risk that the rebound in the epidemic becomes hard to control," Castex said during a visit to a hospital intensive care ward in southern France.
France's 7-day moving average of new infections climbed to 1,640 on Monday from 1,056 on July 31. The 7-day measure reached a post lockdown low of 272 on May 27, a little over 2 weeks after the government eased one of Europe's strictest lockdowns.
But French health authorities on Tuesday reported 1,397 new Covid-19 infections over 24 hours, a significant daily increase.
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