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".
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.
