It was bad enough when plain old coronavirus swept through France last spring. Now the “English variant” has arrived and the level of alarm has gone up several notches. In Marseilles, for instance, Benoît Payan, the mayor, described the situation as “worrying” yesterday after eight cases of the UK strain were detected in the Mediterranean city, all linked to a French family who had returned for Christmas from their home in Britain. Sponsored“Every minute counts to stop the spread of the English variant,” Payan said as doctors warned that France, which has been recording about 20,000 infections a day recently, could soon be in the same boat as Britain, which has had at least three times as many new daily cases this month.

Source: The Times January 11, 2021 00:00 UTC