Coronavirus in India LIVE Updates: At 852, Covid-19 cases in Mumbai spike by almost 79% in last 24 hours

Mumbai today reported 852 Covid-19 cases, the highest daily rise after July 1, and a single fatality, taking the tally to 11,29,285 and the toll to 19,661, the city civic body said.

South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare will stop making Covid-19 vaccines from the end of this month due to a lack of orders, a senior executive said, further undermining Africa's already meager capacity to produce doses.

Keeping in view the spread of Covid-19, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has decided not to celebrate ‘Raksha Bandhan Ustav' and urged people to remain alert during the festival, a CMO official said on Wednesday.

The EU's drug regulator aims to approve this autumn a Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine adapted for two fast-spreading subvariants of the Omicron strain, a spokesman for the watchdog said Wednesday.

Tourism in Germany continues to recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, with overnight stays almost reaching pre-crisis levels in June. The Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday that the number of overnight stays by travellers was only 3.4 per cent below the level of June 2019 at 48.9 million

There is a need for a universal vaccine that can block SARS-CoV-2 infection as well as prevent severe disease from emerging Covid waves in the future, researchers have suggested. Writing in the journal eLife, the team from Columbia University in the US highlighted the need for more proactive planning and preparedness as different variants of concern (VOCs) evade -- the original (or ancestral) SARS-CoV-2 virus, Beta, Delta and Omicron -- the effect of both vaccinations and prior infections.

The new Covid-19 outbreak in Southwest China's Xizang (Tibet) Autonomous Region raises grave concern across the region amid the lack of medical personnel and nucleic acid testing sample collectors, as well as a shortage of oxygen for treating severe cases due to its high altitude. "Now the hospital doesn't have enough manpower to deal with the sudden COVID-19 flare-up, even if we dispatched all its medical workers, including the administrative staff against the epidemic," a staffer from a functional department of the Xigaze Tibetan Hospital told the Global Times on Tuesday.

India on Wednesday recorded 16,047 new coronavirus cases and 54 fatalities including six reconciled by Kerala, according to the latest Union health ministry data. With these additions, the country's overall Covid figures rose to 4,41,90,697 cases and 5,26,826 deaths. The data updated at 9 am showed active cases came down by 3,546 in a span of 24 hours to 1,28,261.

The government has approved Biological E's Corbevax as a precaution dose for those above 18 years fully vaccinated with either Covishield or Covaxin, official sources said on Wednesday. This is for the first time that a booster dose that is different from the one used for primary vaccination against Covid has been allowed in the country.