France on Saturday broke its all-time COVID-19 record, tallying 104,000 new cases in a single day, while the United Kingdom surpassed 122,000 cases.
France had over 94,000 cases the previous day, which was also the previous record. More than 16,000 people are hospitalized with COVID in France and 3,300 of those are in intensive care, Bloomberg reported.
French President Emmanuel Macron planned to convene his Health Defense Council on Monday to plot new measures to keep the country safer. Full vaccinations, with boosters, will likely soon be required to enter any bar, restaurant and cultural venues, according to Bloomberg.
Spain recorded 50,000 new cases in a day earlier in the week, another record, and Italy had nearly 45,000 new cases on Thursday. Several other European countries are overwhelmed by soaring cases and are instituting new restrictions as the more-transmissible omicron variant sweeps across the world.
There were nearly 600,000 cases worldwide on Friday — and more than 128,000 new cases reported on Christmas Day in the U.S. More than 69,000 Americans were hospitalized with COVID on Christmas Eve, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Florida hit a new all-time record of 32,850 COVID cases reported on Saturday, according to The Miami Herald. The previous record was reported the previous day.
“Omicron is 10 [times] more potent at causing reinfection than previous variants — protection from prior infection is not as good as protection from triple” vaccination, Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious-disease expert at Florida International University, told the Herald.
So far, hospitalizations and deaths from omicron appear to be far lower than with the delta variant, but scientists warn that it’s still too early to know what omicron’s final impact will be.
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