Many states have imposed strict lockdowns over the last month while others have placed curbs on movement and shut cinemas, restaurants, pubs and shopping malls.

Tourists in the Everest scenic area in Tibet are also banned from visiting the base camp on the Tibetan side.

Families of the victims blamed the Afghan government and Western powers for failing to put an end to violence and the ongoing war.

The vaccine, one of two main Chinese coronavirus vaccines that have been given to hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere, is the first developed by a non-Western country to win WHO backing.

In a statement on Thursday, the IOC said that while committed to inclusion, it was currently reviewing its guidelines to take into account the "perceived tension between fairness/safety and inclusion/non-discrimination".

As India's deadly second wave of Covid-19 continues unabated, its total number of cases now stand at 21.49 million with 234,083 deaths.

Images from state TV channel PSM showed security services securing the scene of the incident in the capital Male.

Pharmaceutical industry's biggest lobby group warned that Biden's unprecedented step would undermine the companies' response to the pandemic and compromise safety.

India's Covid-19 crisis has been most acute in the capital, New Delhi, among other cities, but in rural areas - home to nearly 70% of India's 1.3 billion people - limited public healthcare is posing more challenges.

“I warned Bolsonaro systematically of the consequences of not adopting the recommendations of science to fight Covid-19,” Mandetta told the commission.

India, currently undergoing the world’s worst surge in Covid-19 cases, is attending the G7 as a guest and had been due to take part in meetings on Tuesday evening and throughout Wednesday.

India’s second deadly surge of Covid-19 has seen hospitals run out of beds and oxygen and left morgues and crematoriums overflowing. Many people have died in ambulances and car parks waiting for a bed or oxygen.

With hospitals running out of beds and oxygen and morgues and crematoria overflowing, experts say the actual numbers could be five to 10 times higher.

Attaullah Afghan, the head of Helmand's provincial council, said the Taliban had launched their huge offensive on Monday from multiple directions, attacking checkpoints around the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, taking over some of them.

Hospitals have filled to capacity, supplies of medical oxygen have run short, and morgues and crematoriums have been overloaded with corpses. Patients are dying on hospital beds, in ambulances and in carparks outside.

Some Covid-19 survivors infected early in the pandemic still have detectable antibodies against the virus a year later, according to a new study.

Launched in 2000, the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ranks as the largest private philanthropic foundation in the United States and one of the world's biggest, with net assets of $43.3 billion at the end of 2019.

Hundreds of people die each year in ferry accidents in Bangladesh, a low-lying country that has extensive inland waterways and lax safety standards.

The deal expands the programme's pipeline of vaccines to eight and contains options to potentially access doses of variant-adapted vaccines in the future, it said.

The government took no steps to prevent gatherings that might hasten the spread of the new variant, as new infections quadrupled by April 1 from a month earlier.