Sweden will tighten nationwide coronavirus restrictions and introduce mandatory face coverings on public transport to control a recent spike in virus cases.

India has become only the second country in the world to pass 10 million confirmed Covid-19 cases, with the last million added in about one month despite a significant drop in new infections in recent days.

Among them were more than 20,000 new infections recorded on Saturday.

The government insists, however, that the country’s proportion of active cases to recoveries is relatively low and falling. 

Our reporter Shweta Sharma in Delhi has the full story:

There were no new cases of locally transmitted Covid-19 in Singapore on Saturday, according to the country’s Ministry of Health.

There have been 17 imported cases, but these people have already been told to quarantine at home or been isolated upon arrival in Singapore.

A vaccine developed by the University of Oxford is set to be approved within days of Christmas, according to senior Whitehall sources.  

If it is given the green light, football stadiums and other sites across the country could be opened from the first week of January to allow mass vaccinations on a scale never seen before in the UK, according to The Telegraph.

Our reporter Liam Coleman has more on the story:

Jeremy Hunt has said households should not mix indoors unless a family member is worried it would be their last Christmas.  

The former health secretary who chairs the Commons health committee said the government could be much clearer on the advice to people, but a change in restrictions should not be criticised.

“It’s very serious and if the government does change its mind we should not condemn it as a screeching U-turn but a responsible thing to do in a pandemic when the facts change,” Hunt told BBC Radio 4.

“And two big facts have changed recently: the first is we have this new strain of the virus, the second is that hospitals admissions are going up very, very sharply.”

A quarter of a million people in Sydney’s northern beach suburbs have entered a strict lockdown until Christmas Eve to help contain a coronavirus cluster amid fears it could spread across Australia’s most populous city.

New South Wales state government is to announce on Sunday whether further restrictions will be imposed on the rest of Sydney, home to around 5 million people.

“I want to make that clear, to say to greater Sydney, please, please, do not go out tonight or the next few days unless you really have to,” NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian said at a news conference.

The outbreak now totals 39 with two additional cases still under investigation. This up from five only two days ago, but authorities do not know the origin of the virus, which genome testing suggests is a US strain.

Christmas dinner presents the “perfect conditions” for coronavirus to spread, an expert has warned.

Professor Stephen Reicher, a social psychologist from the University of St Andrews, told Times Radio: “Christmas is a gift to the virus. If you want the perfect conditions for the spread of virus it would be to be indoors, somewhere that wasn’t well ventilated, somewhere which was crowded, somewhere where there’s alcohol so that we forget our inhibitions and that describes perfectly the Christmas dinner.”

Prof Reicher, who sits on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), which advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), added: “Of course we don’t want to give gifts to this virus, we want to look after ourselves and the best way of doing that, I think, is sadly to postpone if we can.

”I recognise that for some families it does make sense to meet up, I mean, if you’ve got an elderly relative who might not see another Christmas or somebody who’s suffering greatly there will be exceptions.

“But if we turn the exception into the rule and if many people meet, then we really are heading towards a disaster.”

He argued that people meeting over the five days of relaxed measures over Christmas was “too long” and that the mixing of households from different areas across the country could “relaunch the pandemic”.tant strain is spreading fastest in southeast England

Boris Johnson held an emergency meeting of ministers on Friday amid fears a new coronavirus variant is accelerating the spread of the disease.

The mutant strain is thought to have a “transmission advantage” and is spreading fastest in southeast England, where millions more people entered the toughest lockdown restrictions.

Possible measures to curb the spread of the variant being considered by ministers include travel restrictions to and from parts of the southeast, leaving Christmas plans hanging in the balance for millions.

The Meanwhile, latest figures from Sage showed the reproduction number, or R value, of coronavirus transmission across the UK is estimated to have risen to between 1.1 and 1.2 – which means the spread of the disease is accelerating.

Travel curbs aimed at stopping the variant from spreading further across the country are reportedly under discussion, with a source quoted as suggesting movement to and from parts of southeast England could be paused, throwing Christmas plans into doubt for millions.

Professor Sir Mark Walport – a member of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) – said there was a real possibility that it could have a “transmission advantage”.

“What happens with viruses is they do naturally mutate all the time and the ones that are likely to do well are the ones that increase transmission,” he told BBC2’s Newsnight.

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the global coronavirus pandemic from the newsdesk in London, where the situation is growing increasingly concerning.