The French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, said over the weekend: “We are monitoring the situation very closely, because closure the border is a real issue that we also need to discuss with the Spanish authorities.”

Castex made his remarks while touring a in the town of Prades, of which he is mayor, located just over an hour away from the La Junquera border crossing.

The new French prime minister plans to receive Carmen Calvo, the first vice-president of the Spanish Government, on Monday afternoon, at his official residence in Matignon.

“The figures for Barcelona are much worse than those we have in France”, Castex said, after admitting that his government is considering the possibility of establishing localized containment measures if there were a significant resurgence of the coronavirus. For now, he said, “we are not in a serious situation, but it needs surveillance.”

Meanwhile more than 600,000 people have now died from the coronavirus around the world with nearly a quarter of them in the US

England deaths ‘may be overstated by up to 4,000’

The number of people who have died from coronavirus in England may have been overstated by up to 4,000, says the BBC’s health editor Hugh Pym.

It emerged that Public Health England (PHE) have been including anyone who has ever tested positive for the virus and subsequently died – even if from a completely different – in its daily reported Covid-19 death figures.

Pym said: “It looks as if the English death figures have been overstated by a few thousand – between 2,000 and 4,000.”