Here's the latest on the pandemic from around the world.
Europe
Britain
A British junior government minister resigned on Monday in protest at what he said were woeful efforts to stop the fraudulent abuse of government coronavirus support schemes.
Theodore Agnew, a Conservative who sits in parliament's upper house, said he was quitting his post as a minister in the Treasury and Cabinet Office departments. Part of his role included oversight over spending and reducing fraud.
The government last week defended its record of providing support to businesses during the pandemic, disputing reports that it had written off 4.3 billion pounds ($5.8 billion) in fraud across more than 80 billion pounds of job support given by the Treasury, but acknowledging that some fraud had occurred.
However, Agnew said oversight of some other schemes - administered by the British Business Bank and the business ministry - had been "woeful", and that the Treasury had shown little interest in the wider consequences of fraud.
"Given that I'm the minister for counter-fraud, it feels somewhat dishonest to stay on in that role if I'm incapable of doing it properly, let alone defending our track record," Agnew told the House of Lords, listing his efforts to raise a number of problems through official channels.
Italy
Italy reported 77,696 COVID-19 related cases on Monday, against 138,860 the day before, the health ministry said, while the number of deaths rose to 352 from 227 .
Italy has registered 143,875 deaths linked to COVID-19 since its outbreak emerged in February 2020, the second-highest toll in Europe after Britain and the ninth highest in the world. The country has reported 10 million cases to date.
Patients in hospital with COVID-19 - not including those in intensive care - stood at 19,862 on Monday, increasing from 19,627 a day earlier.
There were 101 new admissions to intensive care units, down from 132 on Sunday. The total number of intensive care patients increased to 1,685, unchanged from the day before.
Some 519,293 tests for COVID-19 were carried out in the past day, compared with a previous 933,384, the health ministry said.
Norway
Norway will end its system of mandatory COVID-19 quarantines for non-vaccinated travellers and close contacts of infected persons, replacing it instead with a daily test regime, the government announced on Monday.
Under the current rules, anyone arriving in Norway from an area with a quarantine obligation and who cannot show proof of vaccination, or having undergone COVID-19, needs to quarantine for at least three days.
Close contacts of infected people are required to quarantine for 10 days.
According to the National Institute of Public Health, this is no longer considered necessary for infection control, with the new rules set to apply from Jan. 26, the government said.
The current rules have been criticised for keeping healthy people in quarantine for an unnecessarily long time and especially affecting families with children.
From Wednesday, close contacts are required to test themselves daily for up to 11 days. Those who decline to test are required to quarantine however.
Travellers must still test themselves and register upon arrival in Norway and a negative test taken before arrival is also still necessary for those who cannot document that they are fully vaccinated or recovered, Norway said.
France
Protesters attacked police with stones in the early hours of Monday as police moved in to clear out some blockades on Guadeloupe, the authority on the French Caribbean island said, amid ongoing protests against COVID-19 protocols.
The Guadeloupe authority said police had been attacked at the Riviere-des-Peres part of the island as they tried to clear out roads that had been blockaded.
An 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew has been in force since Jan. 10 in Guadeloupe, where the vaccination rate is much lower than in mainland France, as the island grapples with a new wave of the pandemic fuelled by the Omicron variant.
Croatia
Croatia's conservative Most party handed 82 boxes of papers in to parliament on Monday carrying the signatures of 410,533 people calling on the government to hold a referendum on whether to abolish COVID-19 certificates.
The government must check the signatures, and if they are found to be valid, the date for a referendum can be set.
Croatia has one of the European Union's lowest vaccination rates, with around 55 percent of its population inoculated against COVID-19, ahead of only Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia.
The EU's newest member state reported 1,823 new coronavirus cases on Monday, a significant drop from the 16,017 reported last Tuesday.
Russia
Russia on Monday reported a new record number of COVID-19 cases confirmed in the past 24 hours as the Omicron variant of the virus spread across the country, the government coronavirus task force said.
Daily new cases jumped to 65,109, from 63,205 a day earlier. The task force also reported 655 deaths.
Asia-Pacific
China
A district in China's capital will begin a new round of COVID-19 tests among its roughly 2 million residents on Tuesday, as flare-ups persisted in the city ahead of the Winter Olympics, while four provinces found cases linked to Beijing clusters.
The Beijing municipality reported six new domestically transmitted infections with confirmed symptoms for Sunday, data from the National Health Commission (NHC) showed. It marks the seventh consecutive days of new local confirmed cases for the city.
Since Jan. 15, the city has reported a total of 36 local symptomatic cases, according to the NHC.
Beijing has quickly stepped up measures to block further spreading of the virus, with the Winter Olympics due to start on Feb. 4. China is already in the Lunar New Year holiday travel season.
Organisers of the Games have slightly relaxed their strict COVID measures for participants, including easing the threshold for being designated positive for the coronavirus from PCR tests.
Outside Beijing, the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Liaoning and Hebei have found a total of eight infections linked to the capital.
Fengtai district in Beijing, which on Sunday launched blanket testing, would start a second district-wide testing on Tuesday, a Fengtai official said.
As of Jan. 23, mainland China had reported 105,660 cases with confirmed symptoms, including both local ones and those arriving from abroad.
Japan
Japan on Monday was poised to double the number of regions subject to restrictions such as shortened restaurant opening hours in order to rein in a record surge in COVID-19 cases.
The central government has received requests for the so-called quasi-emergency measures from another 18 prefectures, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters.
The measures allow regional governors to order curbs on mobility and business, such as making restaurants and bars close early and restricting alcohol sales.
Japan has declared various levels of emergency multiple times during the two-year pandemic. A full state of emergency might involve closures of venues serving alcohol, attendance restrictions at sporting and cultural events and fines for non-compliant businesses.
Japan recorded more than 54,000 new COVID cases on Saturday, the highest ever, driven by the infectious Omicron variant.
A stretched medical system amid the fast-spreading variant has led the government to allow doctors to diagnose those who have been in close contact with infected persons and who show COVID symptoms as being infected without testing - if such a move is judged as necessary by local governments.
"To prepare against further rapid spread of infected persons, we presented (new) policy that will enable local authorities to swiftly conduct appropriate testing and treatment of patients by their own judgement," health minister Shigeyuki Goto told reporters after a meeting with Kishida.
The country has recorded 2.1 million coronavirus cases and 18,498 deaths during the pandemic.
India
India's COVID-19 infections, led by the Omicron variant, may see a sharp rise in the coming weeks, some top experts said, noting that the variant was already in community transmission and hospitals were seeing more patients despite a decline in cases in major cities.
India reported 306,064 new infections over the last 24 hours, the health ministry said, about an 8 percent decline from the average daily cases reported in the last four days. Deaths were 439, the lowest in five days.
But weekly positivity rates have risen to 17.03 percent in the week to Jan. 24, from about 0.63 percent Dec. 27, led by the highly-transmissible Omicron variant.
"Omicron is now in community transmission in India and has become dominant in multiple metros," a report by the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium (INSACOG) said on Jan. 10 in a report released on Sunday.
Most cases of the Omicron variant have been mild, the advisory group said, although hospitalisations and cases in intensive care were increasing.
India's tally of overall infections reached 39.54 million, the second-highest globally behind the United States. The country has seen 489,848 people die of the virus.
Americas
Canada
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday accused conservative politicians of stoking fear that COVID-19 vaccine mandates for cross-border truck drivers are exacerbating supply chain disruptions and fueling inflation.
The United States imposed a mandate, meant to aid the fight against the fast spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus, on Jan. 22, while Canada's started on Jan. 15. The trucking industry has warned the measure will take thousands of drivers off the roads during what is already a dire labor shortage in the industry.
Alberta's conservative provincial leader, Jason Kenney, called for a pause of the mandate last week, and on Monday posted pictures on Twitter of empty shelves in supermarkets, calling for "immediate action" by both the U.S. and Canadian federal governments.
"This is turning into a crisis," Kenney wrote.
"I regret that the Conservative Party and conservative politicians are fear mongering to Canadians about the supply chain, but the reality is that vaccination is how we're going to get through this," Trudeau told reporters when asked about supply chain disruptions resulting from the policy.
Middle East and Africa
Israel
Israel's health minister said on Monday he did not think Israel will offer a fourth COVID-19 vaccine dose to most people after the government made it available to over 60s and other high-risk groups.
Israel has been administering the fourth dose to most vulnerable groups - such as the elderly, those with weakened immune systems and health workers - as Omicron surged. Other countries have made the second booster available.
"We took this step, we weighed it seriously, it wasn't a simple decision, but it's good that we did," Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said of offering a fourth shot to those groups.
"But regarding the entire population, I don't think we will go there," he told Israel Radio.
A government advisory panel has been discussing vaccine policy and there has not been a final decision about whether to expand the campaign.
The Health Ministry said on Sunday that a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine given to people over 60 in Israel made them three times more resistant to serious illness than thrice-vaccinated people in the same age group.
It also said the fourth dose made people over 60 twice as resistant to infection than those in the age group who received three shots of the vaccine.
A preliminary study published by Israel's Sheba medical centre last Monday found that the fourth shot increases antibodies to even higher levels than the third but "probably" not to the point that it could completely fend off the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
Egypt
Egypt approved Merck & Co's COVID-19 pill Molnupiravir for emergency use, the country's drug authority said on Monday, adding that the pill would be locally produced.
The drug will initially be manufactured by five local companies, to be joined later by several other firms, the Egyptian Drug Authority said in a statement.
Reuters
