About 1,000 People Infected With UK-Linked Strain of COVID-19 in France - Chief Scientist

PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 13th January, 2021) About 1,000 people in France are infected with the mutated coronavirus strain, which was recently discovered in the UK, President of the French Scientific Council Jean-Francois Delfraissy said in an interview on Wednesday.

Delfraissy confirmed while responding to a follow-up question from a host of the France Info radio station that about 1 percent of PCR tests for COVID-19 out of 100,000 had revealed the mutated strain.

He added that the Scientific Council recommended that schools in France be kept open since the virus penetration data cannot yet be ascertained.

The health expert also assumed that France was likely to partially emerge from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis by the fall of this year.

"We could be out, I would say, mostly, of this crisis � not completely, we would continue to wear masks � around September of 2021," he said.

Apart from the current health measures, France has also launched a mass vaccination campaign to immunize the population with the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Last week, the authorities also greenlighted the US-made vaccine from the Moderna company, expecting to vaccinate around a million citizens by the end of this month.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in France, more than 2.8 million people have been infected with the coronavirus, and more than 68,000 died. On Wednesday, the French Defense Council will discuss the possible tightening of restrictive measures amid the worsening situation with COVID-19.