PARIS, April 15 (AP) - France's coronavirus death toll is expected to pass 100,000 on Thursday (Apr 15) after a year of hospital tensions, on-and-off lockdowns and personal loss that have left families nationwide grieving the pandemic’s unending, devastating toll.

The country of 67 million will be the eighth in the world to reach the symbolic mark, and the third in Europe after the United Kingdom and Italy.

The cumulative death toll since the start of the epidemic totaled 99,777 on Wednesday evening. In recent days, French health authorities have been reporting about 300 new daily deaths from COVID-19.

Lionel Petitpas, president of the association “Victims of COVID-19”, told the Associated Press that the number of 100,000 deaths is “an important threshold".

After months of people getting accustomed to the virus, the figure “is piercing a lot of minds. It is a figure we thought would never be reached”, he said.

French President Emmanuel Macron told Le Parisien newspaper he thinks about all of the people who died in the pandemic and their families.

The pandemic was “so cruel” to individuals “who sometimes were not able to accompany, during the last moments and in death, a father, a mother, a loved one, a friend”, Macron said. Yet the crisis also shows “the ability of the French people to get united”, he added.

France plunged into a third, partial lockdown at the beginning of April, as new infections were surging and hospitals getting close to saturation.

The total number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care in France surged past 5,900 this week. Measures include school closure, a domestic travel ban and the shutting of most non-essential shops.

An overnight nationwide curfew has been in place since mid-December, and all France’s restaurants, bars, gyms, cinemas and museums have been closed since October. Schools are set to gradually reopen starting on Apr 26.

France is the country that has reported the largest number of confirmed infections in Europe, more than 5.1 million.