Belgium has added the French Île-de-France region, which includes Paris, to its list of destinations where travel is allowed under increased vigilance, as new Covid-19 clusters emerge.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry updated its travel guidelines to include the capital city's populous wider region as well as the Pays de Loire region in the northwest of the country.
The changes come as France registered 14 new coronavirus deaths in a 24-hour period and as health authorities warn that the virus is still circulating in the country, with the average number of new weekly cases now at 9 per 100,000 inhabitants.
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Throughout France, authorities say that the daily number of hospital admissions linked to Covid-19 is "in the hundreds," and that novel cases were being detected in particular among young adults.
In a press release on Tuesday, health authorities said that France currently totalled some 624 clusters since 9 May, 14 of which were detected in the past 24 hours.
The move by Belgium's foreign affairs ministry comes just hours after it had already updated its orange travel zone list to include new areas in the UK, Poland and Austria.
Apart Île-de-France and Pays de La Loire, Belgium continues to list the remainder of the French territory as green travel zone, a group of countries including Germany where no particular travel measures or conditions are imposed.
More than a dozen destinations currently figure in Belgium's orange travel zones, including the entire territories of Sweden, Luxembourg, Bulgaria or Croatia.
Gabriela Galindo
The Brussels Times
