Paris (AFP)

New measures, new reports and highlights: an update on the latest developments in the Covid-19 pandemic around the world.

- Record of daily deaths in Russia -

Russia recorded a new record of daily deaths due to Covid-19 on Tuesday, in a context of laborious vaccination and the absence of containment measures despite the wave of the Delta variant which has hit the country since June.

In the last 24 hours, 852 people with the coronavirus have died, according to the report published daily by the government.

A total of 205,531 people have died in the country since the start of the pandemic, according to a restrictive definition of deaths from the virus given by the Russian government.

The Russian statistics agency Rosstat, which has a broader definition, reported more than 350,000 deaths by the end of July 2021.

- The state of emergency in Japan is coming to an end -

Japan will emerge from the state of emergency imposed since July on part of the country in the face of the pandemic, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced on Tuesday, while the health situation has improved significantly in recent weeks.

The current restrictive measures, which mainly consist in asking bars and restaurants to close earlier and not to serve alcohol and event organizers to limit the number of spectators, had been put in place in mid-July, before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

- Covid-19: Sanofi adapts its vaccine strategy -

The French laboratory Sanofi will stop the development of its messenger RNA vaccine against Covid-19, while continuing the development of its other vaccine against the virus, currently in the last phase of clinical trials, he said on Tuesday.

Despite positive interim results for phase 1-2 of the trial, Sanofi believes that its messenger RNA vaccine against Covid-19 would arrive too late on the market.

The results of phase 3 on its other vaccine based on a recombinant protein, developed with the British GSK, are still expected before the end of 2021.

- More than 4.75 million dead -

The pandemic has killed at least 4,752,875 people around the world since the end of December 2019, according to an assessment established by AFP from official sources, Tuesday at 10HGMT.

The United States is the most affected country with 690,426 deaths, followed by Brazil (594,653), India (447,373), Mexico (275,676) and Russia (205,531).

Among the hardest hit countries, Peru is the one with the highest death toll relative to its population, followed by North Macedonia and Hungary.

The WHO estimates, taking into account the excess mortality directly and indirectly linked to Covid-19, that the results of the pandemic could be two to three times higher.

burs-jba / cds / lch

© 2021 AFP