France set a new record of daily COVID-19 infections on Thursday, the fourth in eight days, while the number of people hospitalized for the disease went above 6,000 for the first time in more than two months.
Those figures are published the day after the government announced extra restrictive measures, mainly in big cities and especially in Marseille, to contain the virus.
On their website, French health authorities reported 16,096 new confirmed coronavirus cases, blowing away the previous record of 13,498 and bringing the cumulative total to 497,237, the second-highest in Western Europe behind Spain.