Senior health officials and hospital directors called on Sunday for Israel’s lockdown to be tightened. Health Ministry Director-General Prof. Chezi Levy told Ynet: “The infection rate is running amok and doubling itself and the number of seriously ill patients in hospitals have doubled in less than 10 days.” Levy added that the current lockdown is not adequate and a tighter lockdown is required to bring the infection rate down.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned Sunday that more onerous lockdown restrictions in England are likely as the country reels from a new coronavirus variant that has pushed infection rates to their highest recorded levels. Johnson, though, insisted he has “no doubt” that schools are safe and urged parents to send their children back into the classroom in areas of England where they can. Unions representing teachers have called for schools to turn to remote learning for at least a couple of weeks more due to the new variant, which scientists have said is up to 70% more contagious. The U.K. is in the midst of an acute outbreak, recording more than 50,000 new coronavirus infections a day over the past five days. On Saturday, it notched a daily record of 57,725 new cases.

Turkey’s health minister says the country has identified 15 people who carry a highly contagious coronavirus variant that was discovered in the United Kingdom. In a statement Friday, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the strain was found in travelers arriving from the U.K. He said they were in quarantine, along with people they had been in contact with. He said the strain was not identified in passengers from elsewhere. Turkey suspended flights with the U.K. along with other countries in late December upon discovery of the new strain’s spread and quarantined at least 4,603 passengers. Turkey also began to require a negative PCR test result for all international arrivals last week.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday encouraged schools to resume in-person education next year, starting with the youngest students, and promised $2 billion in state aid to promote coronavirus testing, increased ventilation of classrooms and personal protective equipment. The recommendation was driven by increasing evidence that there are lower risks and increased benefits from in-person instruction particularly for the youngest students, he said. It comes amid increased pressure on schools to reopen campuses based on those rationales.

Israel’s Health Ministry confirmed 5,253 new coronavirus cases in the previous 24 hours on Thursday morning, the third day in a row that over 5,000 new daily virus cases were recorded, with tests showing a 5.5% positivity rate. There are currently 42,402 active virus cases, with 639 seriously ill patients, of whom 165 are ventilated. The death toll has risen to 3,314. Israel’s coronavirus czar Prof. Nachman Ash said on Wednesday evening that the current nationwide lockdown will not be effective in adequately reducing the infection rate, saying that the restrictions need to be tightened considerably. “There is a big question mark about the effectiveness of the lockdown and we will probably have to recommend tightening it the coming days,” he said.

Chinese health regulators said Thursday that they have given conditional approval to a coronavirus vaccine developed by state-owned Sinopharm. The two-dose vaccine is the first approved for general use in China. The go-ahead comes as the country has begun to vaccinate 50 million people before the Lunar New Year holiday in February. Conditional approval means that research is still ongoing, the company will be required to submit follow-up data as well as reports of any adverse effects after the vaccine is sold on the market, Chen Shifei, the deputy commissioner of the National Medical Products Administration, told a news conference. The company “must continuously update the vaccine’s instructions, labels and report to the agency,” Shifei said.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said Tuesday that he was back in his country but still recovering from COVID-19 after two months away. “I passed through difficult moments. I am happy to be back, thank G-d,” Tebboune said in a video broadcast on national public television..” Speaking clearly, he said he needs “a few days” to finish recovering. Tebboune fell ill and left for treatment in Germany in late October. After nearly two months out of the public eye, the 75-year-old president reappeared in mid-December in a video message, saying it might be several weeks before he was fit enough to return to Algeria. “Being far away from the country is difficult,” he said in the video aired Tuesday.

A senior Health Ministry official confirmed on Wednesday that 14 Israelis who returned to Israel on a flight from Dubai were diagnosed with the coronavirus. The passengers on the “coronavirus flight,” which landed on Monday, December 28, have been instructed to quarantine. On Tuesday, Israel canceled the order requiring all travelers returning to Israel from abroad to quarantine in state-run hotels. Instead, passengers will now be required to be tested for the coronavirus at the airport and will then be allowed to quarantine at home, with another mandatory virus test on the ninth day of quarantine. The requirement to quarantine at hotels faced fierce opposition from the public.

Britain on Wednesday became the first country to authorize an easy-to-handle COVID-19 vaccine whose developers hope it will become the “vaccine for the world.” The approval and a shift in policy that will speed up rollout of the vaccine in the U.K. come as a surge in infections threatens to swamp British hospitals. The Department of Health said it had accepted a recommendation from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to authorize emergency use of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and U.K.-based drugmaker AstraZeneca. “The rollout will start on Jan. 4 and will really accelerate into the first few weeks of next year,” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Sky News. Britain has bought 100 million doses of the vaccine.

Russia’s updated statistics on coronavirus-linked deaths show that well over 100,000 people with COVID-19 had died in the pandemic by December, a number much higher than previously reported by government officials. The data released Monday by Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, brought the agency’s count of people with COVID-19 who died between April and November to 116,030. That included cases where the virus was not the main cause of death and where the virus was suspected but not confirmed. The data also showed that the number of deaths from all causes in the first 11 months of this year grew by 229,700, or nearly 14%, compared to the same period in 2019.