Coronavirus: France sends in riot police to enforce face mask rules in Marseille
French riot police are being deployed near Marseille to help enforce
mask requirements as the country registers a spike in COVID-19 cases.
Government
spokesperson Gabriel Attal announced on Monday that 130 police officers
are being sent to Marseille, a coastal city in south-eastern France. It
comes after local authorities made face masks mandatory in all farmers'
markets and in several neighbourhoods.
Face
masks are mandatory in all public indoor places across France as well
as on public transport but town halls can expand the requirement to
outdoor areas if they feel it's necessary.
Several major cities
including Paris, Toulouse, and Lille have introduced such measures in
crowded places to stem the spread of the virus as the rising
temperatures have been accompanied by an increasing number of cases.
Several violent incidents have been reported over people's refusal to wear masks.
A
bus driver died last month in Bayonne, south-west France, after two men
attacked him when he reminded them they ought to wear masks.
A
female nurse was also beaten last week in Seine-Saint-Denis, just north
of Paris, after she asked two teenagers climbing aboard a bus to wear
face coverings.
France recorded more than 3,300 new COVID-19 cases
on Saturday — the highest tally since the country started easing
lockdown restrictions in mid-May — followed by just over 3,000 new
infections on Sunday, according to data from the Health Ministry.
More
than 30,400 people are known to have lost their lives to COVID-19 in
France since the beginning of the outbreak — the seventh-highest tally
in the world.
An uptick in cases in Italy — the EU's most heavily
impacted country — prompted the authorities to shut down all dance
venues and to make masks mandatory everywhere from 18:00 to 06:00.
Similar measures were also introduced in Spain, where COVID-19 hospitalizations have quintupled since early July.
But
anti-mask sentiment is spreading. Several hundred people demonstrated
in Brussels and Madrid over the weekend against masks, arguing that
being forced to wear one goes against their civil rights.According to a study commissioned by the World Health Organisation and released in June in The Lancet, wearing a face mask decreases the risk of infection to the wearer by 65 per cent.
Source: Euronews
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