Iraq will re-impose partial lockdown measures until early March after detecting a new strain of the coronavirus, including among children, its health minister announced on Monday. 

As the coronavirus spread across the globe, so too did speculation about its origins. Perhaps the virus escaped from a lab. Maybe it was engineered as a bioweapon.

Legitimate questions about the virus created perfect conditions for conspiracy theories. In the absence of knowledge, guesswork and propaganda flourished.

Lebanon administered Sunday its first jabs of COVID-19 vaccine, with an intensive care unit physician and a well-known 93-year-old comedian becoming the first to receive Pfizer-BioNTech doses.

Lebanon launched its inoculation campaign a day after receiving the first batch of the vaccine -- 28,500 doses from Brussels, near where Pfizer has a manufacturing facility. More were expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani warned Saturday of a Covid-19 "fourth wave" as cases rise in certain areas of the Middle Eastern country hardest hit by the pandemic.

The head of the EU's disease control agency warned Friday that the novel coronavirus could last indefinitely even as global infections slowed by nearly half in the last month and vaccine rollouts gathered pace in parts of the world.

As part of the Connecting Classrooms Global program, the British Council organized a virtual event to discuss how policy makers can identify the issues relating to health and well-being in schools, assess the needs for policy and practice and then apply their learning so that it meets the needs of their country school systems.

Deaths from Covid-19 in Africa surged by 40 percent over the last month, the World Health Organization said Thursday, as the continent's toll approaches 100,000.

The World Health Organization on Thursday warned of a "false sense of security" in Europe, saying most of the continent's nations were still vulnerable despite a fall in Covid cases.

A total of 100,000 people have died in the Middle East after contracting Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic in December 2019, according to an AFP tally at 0800 GMT on Thursday based on official data.

WHO vaccine experts said Wednesday the AstraZeneca-Oxford Covid-19 vaccine could be used for people aged over 65, and also in settings where variants of the virus are circulating.