Yusuf Ozcan
03 February 2021•Update: 03 February 2021
PARIS
France has registered 23,337 new novel coronavirus cases, bringing its tally to over 3.22 million, health authorities announced Tuesday.
Another 404 people died from the virus in the last 24 hours and 322 passed away at elderly care centers in the last four days, taking the country’s death toll to 77,238.
A total of 28,071 people are being treated at hospitals, 3,280 of whom are in intensive care, while the number of recoveries has risen by 1,577 to 226,896.
The number of people who have been vaccinated since Dec. 27 last year has exceeded 1.54 million, according to Health Ministry data.
Earlier, President Emmanuel Macron said the French people can be vaccinated by the end of the summer as in other European countries, adding that 80% of those staying in nursing homes will be vaccinated by the beginning of March.
He also said that four pharmaceutical companies in the country will start producing the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and CureVac vaccines in late February or early March.
The EU, which has a population of around 450 million, signed advanced purchase agreements with six vaccine producers -- Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, CureVac, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline -- to buy about 2.3 billion vaccine doses.
Since first emerging in December 2019, the coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 2.25 million lives in 192 countries and regions, according to US-based Johns Hopkins University.
More than 103.8 million cases and over 57.6 million recoveries have been reported worldwide.
*Writing by Jeyhun Aliyev from Ankara
