Another 5,089 people in Britain have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of coronavirus cases in the country to 4,263,527, according to official figures released Monday.
The country also reported another 64 coronavirus-related deaths. The total number of coronavirus-related deaths in Britain now stands at 125,580. These figures only include the deaths of people who died within 28 days of their first positive test.
More than 24.4 million people in Britain have been given the first jab of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the latest official figures.
Earlier Monday, surge testing was extended to two more areas of London after cases of the COVID variant first emerged in South Africa was discovered.
The British Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said additional testing and genomic sequencing is being used in Southwark and parts of Harrow.
Enhanced contract tracing will be used for people who test positive with the variant, the DHSC said.
Experts have raised concerns over the efficacy of current vaccines in the variants first found in South Africa and Brazil.
Early this month, Britain's medicines and health care regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), announced that future vaccines that have been tweaked to deal with new coronavirus variants will be fast-tracked for authorization,
To bring life back to normal, countries such as Britain, China, Germany, Russia and the United States have been racing against time to roll out coronavirus vaccines.
