French Health Ministry Olivier Veran said on Tuesday that the number of new COVID-19 cases identified in France per one day has increased by 150% week-on-week.

Veran said that 18,000 COVID-19 infections were recorded in the past 24 hours, whereas last week the figure was 7,000.

“It means that we are having a roughly 150% increase in the spread of the virus in one week — we have never seen anything like this before, neither with COVID-19, nor with the English variant, nor with the South-African one, nor with the Brazilian one,” the minister was quoted as saying by BFMTV.