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French authorities have announced public alcohol consumption and sales bans in Paris, in a bid to ease pressure on the capital’s hospitals during the heatwave.

Parisians will be restricted from drinking alcohol in public from noon on Friday until 07:00 on Saturday. The measures will be in place during the same hours from Saturday to Sunday.

Heatwave conditions that have left Spain, the UK, and France sweltering for days are set to shift to the east, with forecasters in Germany and the Czech Republic warning of extreme conditions.

Temperatures in Germany could hit 40C across the country on Friday. An extreme weather warning is now in place in much of the Czech Republic.

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the health alert level was being raised to its highest, to boost hospital staffing and protect the vulnerable.

Bans on takeaway alcohol sales will be in effect from 18:00 on Friday until 07:00 on Saturday in the capital, and again during the same hours from Saturday to Sunday.

Licensed bars and restaurants are exempt from the restrictions.

Speaking to local media, Paris police chief Patrice Faure said: “We are reaching a saturation point in hospital facilities.”

United Nations climate change chief Simon Stiell has said “Europe’s savage heatwave has the fingerprints of the climate crisis all over it”, and he has called for “a faster shift to renewables, protecting forests and boosting climate resilience”.

After France recorded its hottest day on Wednesday for the second day in a row, records continue to be broken. Météo-France said the average minimum temperature reached 22C on Wednesday night. Nantes saw 27.2C in the north-west.

After days of record-breaking temperatures in France, officials have warned people to adjust their behaviour, with Health Minister Stéphanie Rist saying there were risks to young people as well as the elderly.

Rist said, “young people are also suffering from cardiac arrests”. The ambulance service in Paris had seen four times more cardiac arrests than normal over a 24-hour period, said Rist, while stressing there were no confirmed figures for the number of deaths linked to the heatwave.

Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said the mortality rate was on the rise in the capital.

“We must not believe we are invulnerable,” he told French TV. “I am thinking especially about the youth… At about 19:30 last night… I saw 100 or so joggers on the street. Frankly, that’s irresponsible.”

“It’s fine to take a couple of days off from exercising,” he added.

Rist said everyone had to adjust their personal activity to the high temperatures: “Even if you are young and in good health with no underlying medical issues, this heat will affect you too.”

Even cycling came with risks, she warned, from high temperatures that lasted a week, as people would start feeling faint and might fall and even end up in hospital.

Meanwhile, a three-year-old child has been found dead in a car in the Paris region, days after two young children were found dead in the family’s car in the southern town of Carpentras.

In the north-western city of Rennes, the head of the Accident and Emergency department, Professor Louis Soulas, linked the deaths of five or six people in their homes in the region to the extreme temperatures.

Emergency services had gone to check in on them after they had failed to pick up their phones during welfare calls, said Soulas: “It’s not just the very elderly; it’s people aged 60 and up.”

Rennes saw a record 40.6C on Monday, only for that to be broken by 41C the following day. The previous record dated back to 2022.

The region’s intensive care units were “saturated,” he warned. “We are truly at a peak of activity.”

Lecornu said France’s Orsan health emergency plan was now moving to level three so the health system could “withstand the strain over time and protect the most vulnerable”.

French teachers’ unions are calling for a strike in response to “unacceptable working conditions” in the heat. They said that despite having called for mitigation measures to be taken, “nothing was done” and the “health of staff, students and their working conditions are being jeopardised”.

Three nuclear plants in France have gone offline due to the heat.

Some western regions are now bracing for huge thunderstorms from Thursday afternoon onwards.

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