Global COVID-19 tracker

The total coronavirus cases across the world are more than 8,85,12,240 and the virus has killed over 19,06,853 people so far.

Hyderabad:The coronavirus pandemic has infected more than 8,85,12,240 and killed over 19,06,853 people across the world. More than 6,36,19,979 people have recovered so far.

The US is the worst-hit nation with cases more than 2,21,32,045 and fatalities over 3,74,124.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the easing of England's new national lockdown, the third of its kind since the onset of the pandemic early last year, will be a "gradual unwrapping" and not a "big bang".

Global COVID-19 tracker

Addressing MPs in the House of Commons, Johnson said that the government will use "every available second" of the lockdown to place an "invisible shield" around the elderly and other vulnerable people through the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines in the coming weeks, reports Xinhua news agency.

The Prime Minister justified his decision to order a third national shutdown with the emergence of a new variant of the virus first identified in Britain, which is said to be up to 70 per cent more transmissible.

Around 4,000 financial service firms across the UK have been facing low resilience and were at a heightened risk of failure by the end of October 2020 amid the raging Covid-19 pandemic, the country's financial regulatory body said.

"These are predominantly small and medium-sized firms and approximately 30 percent have the potential to cause harm in failure," Xinhua news agency quoted the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as saying in a report issued on Thursday.

Of the 23,000 companies surveyed by the regulator, 59 per cent of respondents said they expected the pandemic to have a negative impact on their net income, according to the report.

Restaurants, bars, cinemas in France will not reopen in January as earlier planned due to the high rate of Covid-19 infections and the risk of fresh cases of the new coronavirus variants recently detected in the UK and South Africa, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced.

"The situation is far from being back to normal. The level of contamination remains high and has tended to increase since mid-December," Xinhua news agency quoted Castex as saying at a press conference on Thursday.

An average of 15,000 infections are registered per day versus 10,000 recorded in December 2020.