Cyprus confirmed its first cases Wednesday of the Covid-19 variant behind the acceleration of India's explosive outbreak, detected among four people quarantined upon arrival, the health ministry said.

India on Wednesday reported a record 4,529 coronavirus deaths in a single day even as the number of new cases in its devastating new wave fell.

Singapore will close schools from Wednesday as authorities warned new coronavirus strains such as the one first detected in India were affecting more children in the city-state.

Countries belonging to the G7 and the European Union can afford to donate more than 150 million vaccines to countries in need without compromising their own goals, UNICEF said Monday.

An expert panel on Wednesday blamed bad coordination as well as dithering by national governments and international organizations for the failure to tackle Covid-19 before it became a full-blown pandemic, as India's death toll topped 250,000.

With a record 4,205 deaths in the past 24 hours in India, the variant stoking the country's surge has now been detected in dozens of other countries across the globe.

India's coronavirus death toll surpassed 250,000 on Wednesday, official data showed, as the pandemic raged across the vast country of 1.3 billion people.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday authorized the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine for children aged 12 to 15 years old.

Spain has lifted a state of emergency in place since October to fight the pandemic, allowing Spaniards to travel between regions for the first time in months.

New daily Covid-19 deaths have surged past 4,000 for the first time in India in one of the world's worst outbreaks, as EU pressure mounted on Washington to end vaccine export limits and offer a concrete plan to lift patents.

The EU has concluded a deal with BioNTech/Pfizer for up to 1.8 billion extra doses of its Covid-19 vaccine, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Saturday.