France will delay relaxing some COVID-19 lockdown restrictions if necessary to stave off a third wave of infections, government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday.
France is due to reopen cinemas, theatres, and museums and allow citizens to move between regions on Dec. 15, but there are signs it may not meet preconditions to enter into the second phase of rolling back the curbs.
"If we consider that ... we must modify this second phase (of lifting lockdown measures), then of course we will do it," Attal told CNews television.
President Emmanuel Macron will discuss the matter with senior ministers on Wednesday. He had originally set a target of 5,000 new infections per day and fewer than 3,000 COVID patients in intensive care before the lockdown could be eased.
The numbers in ICU nationwide hover just above 3,000 but are consistently falling. However, the downward trend in infections has flattened, with the number of confirmed new cases rising to above 13,000 on Tuesday.
In a related development, the French agriculture ministry said on Wednesday that the coronavirus outbreak detected last month on a mink farm did not involve a mutated strain of the virus.
Denmark's discovery of a variant form of the novel coronavirus that passed from humans to mink and back to humans led the country to slaughter all of its 17 million farmed mink.
The outbreak in France led the authorities to cull all the animals at the mink farm in the Eure-et-Loir region southwest of Paris.
"Sequencing analysis of the virus discovered in the Eure-et-Loir farm allows us to exclude any contamination by a variant of SARS-COV-2," the agriculture ministry said in a statement.
The SARS-COV-2 virus causes the COVID-19 disease.
The most likely cause of the French outbreak was transmission to mink by infected humans, the ministry said.
No coronavirus cases have been detected at France's three other mink farms, it added.
