PARIS, Dec 13 — France will be hit by a sixth Covid-19 wave next month due to the emergence of the new, more contagious, Omicron variant of the disease while the country is still in the midst of the current, Delta-fuelled, fifth wave of the pandemic, according to a leading French hospital executive.

"We haven’t said a word on the sixth wave, which is Omicron, which will come later, in January”, Martin Hirsch, head of Paris’s AP-HP hospitals group, Europe’s largest hospital system, told RTL radio.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned yesterday that the UK was facing a "tidal wave” of the Omicron variant of coronavirus and that two vaccine doses would not be enough to contain it. — Reuters