France’s high-profile culture minister has been hospitalized for COVID-19, the latest senior official to become ill as the nation faces a third surge of coronavirus infections, this one propelled by a highly contagious variant first found in Britain, reports Yahoo! News.
Roselyne Bachelot, 74, announced last weekend that she tested positive and her hospitalization was made public Wednesday, just as employment minister Elisabeth Borne left the hospital, tweeting “I’m relieved.”
The virus has been gaining steam in France, with ICUs in the Paris region, the north and southeast France bursting at the seams.
President Emmanuel Macron, infected months earlier but never hospitalized, announced Tuesday that France would accelerate its vaccination campaign, dropping eligibility from age 75 to 70. Mass inoculations are being set up all over France, some being staffed by firefighters.
“We haven’t had such a high number of hospital admittances in 24 hours since the beginning of the first wave,” the head of the public hospital system, Martin Hirsch, said Wednesday in a message to personnel.