国际英语新闻:France's COVID-19 hospitalizations up by 470 in one day

PARIS, April 4 (Xinhua) -- The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in France rose by 470 in a single day to a total of 29,356, showed health authorities data released on Sunday.

Among them, 5,341 cases required intensive care, up by 68 compared with the day before.

France reported 66,794 COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, bringing the accumulative total to 4,822,470 since the outbreak of the pandemic.

The country entered its third national lockdown on Saturday as shops deemed non-essential have to close, people's movement is limited to a radius of 10 kilometers from home while nurseries and schools will be closed for three to four weeks.

Under the lockdown, inter-cities travels are prohibited. All non-essential shops, or 150,000 businesses, shut down at a cost of 11 billion euros (12.94 billion U.S. dollars), according to Bruno Le Maire, Minister of the Economy, Finance and the Recovery.

"These measures will have an impact on the French economy. We are therefore going to revise our growth from 6 percent to 5 percent for 2021," the minister told the French weekly paper Le Journal du Dimanche.

In 2020, the French economy shrank by 8.3 percent, the worst recession since World War II, as the pandemic took a heavy toll on economic activities.

To date, more than 9.29 million people in France, or 17.7 percent of the adult population, have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 3.13 million have received two injections, according to the health ministry.

France aims to vaccinate 10 million citizens this month, 20 million by mid-May and a total of 30 million, or two-thirds of the adults, by summer. (1 euro = 1.18 U.S. dollars)