About one Parisian is getting coronavirus disease (COVID-19) every 30 seconds, and one is brought to the hospital due to the disease every 15 minutes, according to France’s health minister Olivier Veran said.

In a report by Reuters, Veran told RTL Radio the said figures as a response to the pleas of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to reopen small bookshops and stores in order to save the city’s economy amid the new lockdown restrictions in the country.

The health minister said such a decision will prove very risky due to the high transmission rates in the French capital.

He added that the government wants to save Parisians and French people, and that they have to do it with “determination and consistency.”

“She cannot ignore the fact that every 15 minutes, in the hospitals of Paris, there is someone ill who has been hospitalised with Covid. She cannot ignore the fact that every 30 seconds, there is a Parisian who has been contaminated,” Veran told RTL Radio.

As of this writing, France has a total of 1,461,391 reported COVID-19 cases and 37,492 deaths, according to the data released by Johns Hopkins University and Medicine

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