The devastation being wrought across India by the resurgence of coronavirus should serve as a warning to governments around Africa, the head of the African Union’s disease control agency has warned.

The continent of 1.3 billion would be even more overwhelmed than India by a similar surge in cases as African nations do not have sufficient numbers of health care workers, hospital beds or oxygen supplies, said John Nkengasgong, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We are watching with total disbelief … What is happening in India cannot be ignored by our continent,” he told reporters.

Mr Nkengasgong urged Africans to wear masks and avoid large gatherings, warning: “We cannot and should not find ourselves in [India’s] scenario because of the very fragile nature of our health systems.”

Chart here showing that the proportion of vaccine-hesitant people in Britain has declined by nearly three-quarters since November.

Based on a recent YouGov report which found the UK has the lowest rate of vaccine hesitancy of all 26 countries surveyed. A mix of rich and poorer countries were surveyed including the US, China, Germany and Vietnam.

Hungary has said it is open to a vaccine passport scheme that would allow international travel with participating countries.

Budapest will consider plans for the mutual acceptance of vaccination cards with any country open to the idea, prime minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, although he did not name any states that have so far expressed an interest in the move.

India’s deadly second wave of Covid-19 is at a “critical” point, the Red Cross has warned.

The charity says it has 46,000 staff and volunteers across 550 districts helping with the crisis.

It is calling on the public to donate to its appeal, which will provide extra medical care.

Professor Geeta Nargund, vice-chair of the British Red Cross, said: “Right now, the situation in India is critical… its hospitals are full, its streets are lined with ambulance queues and its crematoriums are running out of space.

“I know from my own family in India how dire the current crisis has become because of oxygen and hospital beds running out in their city.”

Prof Nargund added: “They are terrified and most of them are not vaccinated as is the case across India. India needs our help and Covid will not be defeated until it is defeated everywhere.”

All adults in Greece will be offered a Covid-19 vaccine by the end of June, the country’s health minister has said.

Vassilis Kikilias, speaking on Greece’s Skai radio on Thursday, said the country was going to be carrying out 100,000 vaccinations per day as of 5 May, and that “any adult who wishes to” will be able to receive a vaccine by June 30.

Public Health Wales said a total of 1,816,451 first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine have now been given in Wales.

The agency said 732,643 second doses have also been administered.

For several hours on Wednesday Facebook blocked a hashtag calling for the resignation of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, hiding over 12,000 posts critical of the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, writes Vishwam Sankaran.

Users looking for content on the platform under “#ResignModi” were shown a message which said the posts are “temporarily hidden,” and that some content in the posts are against Facebook community standards.

The social media giant claimed that it “blocked the hashtag by mistake,” and “not because the Indian government asked them to,” and later restored the posts, according to a tweet by Andy Stone, policy communications manager at Facebook.

Reacting to the removal, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said the “government hasn’t issued any direction to remove the hashtag. FB clarified it was removed by mistake.”

Germany has managed to break the rapid rise in new coronavirus infections, but it is still too early to sound the all-clear, the head of the federal health agency said today.

“Unfortunately, the pandemic is not over yet,” Lothar Wieler from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious disease told a weekly news conference, adding that Covid-19 cases remain too high and are rising among those aged under 60.

Infections started to plateau in Germany around two weeks ago after more than a month of rising sharply.

There have been around 20,000 new cases a day for the past fortnight, according to John Hopkins University.

A total of 16,776 people tested positive for coronavirus in England in the week to 21 April, new data shows.

This is down 9 per cent on the previous week and is the lowest number since September, according to the latest Test and Trace figures.

Indian author Arundhati Roy has criticised Narendra Modi’s government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, slamming him for his early triumph over coronavirus and describing it as “outright crime against humanity.”

“The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps ‘failed’ is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity,” Ms Roy wrote in The Guardian.

Describing the current government as a “crisis-generating machine,” Ms Roy said it is “incapable of leading us out of this disaster”.

She said “Modi the magician” took a bow for saving humanity by containing the virus during the first wave while “boasting and gloating” about the virus doing less damage than predicted by experts.

“Now that it turns out that he has not contained it, can we complain about being viewed as though we are radioactive? That other countries’ borders are being closed to us and flights are being cancelled?