2026-07-03 from globalnews.ca

Deaths surged by nearly a third in France during the hottest week of a record heat wave last month, the country’s public health authority said Friday, reporting at least 2,000 more deaths than in the previous week when temperatures were already climbing and filling emergency wards with heat victims.

The new and still incomplete figures from Public Health France doubled its first preliminary estimate of at least 1,000 additional deaths that it gave last Sunday. That earlier estimate covered just three of the hottest days of extreme, deadly heat.

In Paris, funeral service directors have said they’ve struggled to find places to store bodies before burial or cremation, with some mortuaries saying they were full and having to turn bodies away.

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