Bangkok's nightlife will go quiet as a ban on bars, nightclubs and restaurant alcohol sales goes into effect Saturday, among a raft of restrictions aimed at curbing the kingdom's rising coronavirus toll.

The United States marked the New Year on Friday by passing the extraordinary milestone of 20 million Covid-19 cases, after global celebrations welcoming in 2021 were largely muted by the pandemic.

China has confirmed its first case of a new coronavirus variant that was recently detected in Britain, health officials said.

Germany's "historic" coronavirus crisis will extend into 2021 even if the vaccines bring some hope, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday in her New Year's greetings.

China has granted "conditional" market approval to a Sinopharm vaccine with a reported 79 percent efficacy rate against Covid-19, health authorities said Thursday, a major stride towards inoculating the world's largest population.

Britain on Wednesday became the first country to authorize an easy-to-handle COVID-19 vaccine whose developers hope it will become the "vaccine for the world." The approval and a shift in policy that will speed up rollout of the vaccine in the U.K. comes as a surge in infections threatens to swamp British hospitals.

The number of coronavirus cases in the Chinese city where the pathogen was first detected may have been 10 times higher than official figures suggest, according to a study by health authorities in Wuhan.

Indian authorities were trying Wednesday to track down tens of thousands of people who entered the country from Britain in recent weeks as cases of a new and fast-spreading coronavirus strain more than doubled in 24 hours.

Phase 3 trials of a Sinopharm coronavirus vaccine found it was 79 percent effective, the Chinese pharma giant said Wednesday, lower than rival jabs developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna but a potential breakthrough in the battle to stem the pandemic in Asia.

Germany's daily coronavirus death toll has crossed 1,000 for the first time, health authorities said Wednesday.