France daily coronavirus cases top record 30,000

A medical staff performs a test on a student at a Covid-19 test center located in the former 4th district City Hall during a visit of French Prime Minister and Paris Mayor in Paris on October 15, 2020.  (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP)

PARIS, France — The number of people who have tested positive for coronavirus in France over the past 24 hours has exceeded 30,000 for the first time, official data showed on Thursday.

France’s public health agency said that a total 30,621 confirmed cases of Covid-19 had been detected in the past 24 hours, a record daily total.

The number of people who have died from the novel coronavirus over the same 24-hour period stood at 88, bringing the total number of deaths in France since the start of the pandemic to 33,125, the agency said.

The so-called positivity rate — the proportion of people infected out of the total number of those tested — rose to 12.6 percent on Thursday from 12.2 percent on Wednesday.

President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday ordered a nighttime curfew for Paris and eight other French cities to contain the spread of Covid-19 as the daily new infection rates reached alarming record levels.

For a number of days now, the number of people admitted to intensive care has also been rising, from 171 new patients on Monday to 226 on Tuesday, 193 on Wednesday and 219 on Thursday, the data showed.

The number of daily hospitalisations rose to 1,741, 77 more than the day before.

Health minister Olivier Veran said that France currently has some 5,800 beds on intensive care wards.

At the height on the pandemic at the start of April, more than 7,000 coronavirus patients were in intensive care. The number fell sharply until the end of July, but has been on the rise again since then.