Belgium has decided to ban its population from non-essential travel across borders from Wednesday until March 1, a government source told AFP on Friday confirming information from Belgian media.
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This decision aims to stem the spread of Covid-19 and recently appeared variants.
Are prohibited "
leisure or pleasure trips, there will be border controls with fines,
" another leader, Elio Di Rupo, president of the Walloon region, told RTBF television channel.
Frontier workers are not affected.
Belgium, hard hit by the pandemic
Since the beginning of the afternoon, a meeting took place around Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, associating the heads of regional executives, to assess the epidemiological situation of the country and consider new measures.
Mr De Croo was due to speak at a press conference after the meeting.
Belgium, which has 11.5 million inhabitants, is one of the European states hardest hit by the pandemic.
The death of more than 20,000 people linked to the coronavirus has already been recorded.
While this country considers that it has contained the second wave better (around 2,000 new cases per day currently) than some of its neighbors, Germany and the Netherlands in particular, the contagiousness of the British variant of the virus is causing serious concern.
The latter has already caused dozens of contaminations in retirement homes and forced the temporary closure of several schools.
"
We must understand that we are in a totally exceptional situation
," the head of Belgian diplomacy Sophie Wilmès told AFP on Thursday.
She thus explained the call launched by Belgium to its EU partners to ban non-essential travel abroad (including within the Schengen free movement area).
For almost three months, to stem the second wave of the pandemic, Belgium has been partially confined, with schools open but multiple sectors of activity closed (cafes, restaurants, theaters, sports, hairdressing salons, etc. ).