Denmark announced on Friday it would close cinemas, theaters and concert halls and restrict restaurant opening hours over a record number of daily COVID-19 cases, accelerated by the Omicron variant.

The government also plans to close other gathering places such as amusement parks and museums.

"Theaters, cinemas and concert halls, they will have to close," Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told a news conference.

"We need to limit our activity. We all need to limit our social contacts," she added.

The measures will come into force on Sunday morning for four weeks, the government said.

This is a sharp turnaround for the Nordic country, which had lifted all restrictions on September 10, before reintroducing a "coronapass" at the beginning of November and then announcing a first round of restrictions last week.

Dealing with new record numbers on a daily basis, the government has accelerated the rollout of booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines, authorized an anti-COVID-19 pill treatment by U.S. drugmaker Merck for serious cases and started vaccinations of children aged five to 11.

The Scandinavian country recorded a new all-time high of more than 11,000 cases in the past 24 hours, Frederiksen said.

Denmark, which sequences more samples than many other countries, is among those countries with the highest numbers of confirmed Omicron cases.

More than 2,500 cases of the reportedly more transmissible variant have been recorded in the last 24 hours.

Restaurants and nightclubs will need to close at 11:00 p.m., instead of the current limit of midnight, and alcohol sales will be banned after 10:00 p.m. local time.

The government said in the afternoon that parliament had approved the measures.

Queen Margrethe II postponed celebrations marking her five decades on the throne originally set for January 14 until "the end of the summer", the palace said.

Unlike during earlier virus waves, Frederiksen said the government still planned to re-open schools after the holidays, even though the Christmas break had already been extended to counter the surge.

"Our aim is still to keep society as open as possible," she said, adding that more restrictive measures introduced in the spring of 2020 could be avoided "because we have vaccines".

Denmark has reported a total of 600,468 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic and 3,054 associated deaths.

Around 500 people are currently hospitalized, including a few dozen in intensive care. Hospitals expect the number of hospitalizations to hit 1,000 in the country of 5.8 million people.