France to ease quarantine rules for vaccinated

France will ease isolation restrictions for the vaccinated starting next week, reducing the number of quarantine days to seven, Health Minister Olivier Veran said on Sunday in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche.

“From Monday, fully vaccinated people who tested positive [for Covid-19] will have to isolate themselves for seven days. This isolation can be lifted after five days in the event of a negative antigen or PCR test,” Veran said.

According to the minister, there will be no quarantine for fully inoculated individuals whose close contact tested positive.

Until January 2, those who tested positive in France had to isolate for 10 days with their close contracts also quarantined for a week.

On Monday, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced a set of new restrictions in the face of the active spread of the new variant of the coronavirus, Omicron, including mandatory mask-wearing in city centres, limits of 2,000 people in indoor gatherings and 5,000 outdoors, the reduction of waiting time for booster vaccine shots from four to three months, partial remote work, and others. The measures will go into effect on Monday.

The daily number of new coronavirus cases in France has been growing since November. The country passed the 10 million cases mark last week.

France became the sixth country in the world to report more than 10 million Covid-19 infections since the outbreak of the pandemic, according to official data published on Saturday.

French health authorities reported 219,126 new confirmed cases in a 24-hour period, the fourth day in a row that the country has recorded more than 200,000 cases.

France joined the United States, India, Brazil, Britain and Russia in having had more than 10 million cases.

--With inputs from agencies