Coronavirus death toll in France passes 10,000
8 April 2020, 00:12
The coronavirus death toll in France has passed 10,000.
France's national health director Jerome Salomon said the number of dead had climbed to more than 10,300.
He said: "We are in the epidemic's ascendant stage. We have not yet reached the peak."
But Mr Salomon offered a glimpse of hope, saying the virus rate is "slowing a little".
To keep up social distancing, Paris banned daytime jogging just as the warm spring weather settled in.
Authorities in the capital banned all outdoor sports activities between 10am and 7pm after Parisians took to the streets in numbers over the weekend to enjoy the sunny weather.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and police prefect Didier Lallement said Parisians should limit their movement to urgent or indispensable outings amid stringent coronavirus lockdown measures implemented across the country.
Starting on Wednesday, Parisians can only exercise outdoors when "street crowd is at its lowest".
Parisians were previously allowed to exercise outdoors for an hour while carrying a form explaining the reason why they were going out.
In the same day, neighbouring Spain recorded a rise of daily coronavirus infections and deaths for the first time in five days, a result consistent with previous Tuesdays when a weekend backlog of tests and fatalities are reported.
With 743 new deaths in the last 24 hours, some 100 more than the fatalities seen from Sunday to Monday, Spain's death toll neared 13,800 since the beginning of the pandemic, Health Ministry data showed. The total of confirmed infections rose over 140,000, with 5,478 new ones on Tuesday, 1,000 more than on Monday. Both figures had been declining since April 2.
Authorities have said that cementing the flattening of the contagion arc will be a long process but they have pinned hopes on how pressure is easing in hospitals, mostly in emergency wards.
As part of de-escalating measures being debated for coming weeks, Spain's left-wing government wants to test 30,000 households to draw the national map of the outbreak. The goal is to measure how much the virus has spread beyond hospitals and nursing homes, which had become big contagion clusters.
So far, the coronavirus pandemic has infected more than 1.3 million people worldwide and over 74,000 deaths have been recorded.
