A COVID-19 patient is hospitalized in London on January 2, 2021. (Photo: AFP/VNA)

The US leads the world in the number of infections (28.3 million) and deaths (498,200). On Monday alone, 34,800 new cases were reported in the US. It is followed by India (10.9 million infections and 155,800 deaths) and Brazil (9.8 million infections and 240,000 deaths).

On Monday, the UK started sending travelers from coronavirus hot spots to mandatory quarantine as a new measure to contain the virus. Those returning from 33 countries deemed at “high risk” from COVID-19 variants are subject to self-isolate in a government approved facility for 10 days over growing fear that new variants will enter the UK, which, so far, has had more than 4 million COVID-19 patients, 117,300 of them have died.

Another coronavirus variant with a potentially worrying set of mutations has been detected in the UK, experts have said. The variant, known as B1525, is the subject of a report by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, who say it has been detected through genome sequencing in 10 countries including Denmark, the US and Australia, with 32 cases found in the UK so far. The earliest sequences were dated to December and cropped up in the UK and Nigeria. The team said the variant contains a number of mutations that have worried researchers, including the E484K mutation to the spike protein – a protein found on the outside of the virus that plays an important role in helping the virus to enter cells. This E484K mutation is present in variants that emerged in South African and Brazil and is thought to make the virus better able to evade neutralizing antibodies produced by the body.