Nearly 60% of Japanese favour the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, a latest survey conducted by Kyodo News showed on Sunday, dpa reported. The survey indicated that 59.7% of those polled agreed to cancel the postponed Olympics, while 25.2% said the Games should be held without an audience and 12.6% said the event should go ahead with a limited number of spectators.

The World Health Organization issued a grim warning on Friday that the second year of Covid-19 was set to be "far more deadly", as Japan extended a state of emergency amid growing calls for the Olympics to be scrapped, AFP reported. "We're on track for the second year of this pandemic to be far more deadly than the first," WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

India reported a new record of new Covid-19 cases with daily numbers surging for a twelfth day in a row to 300,000. Official data put total number of cases since the beginning of pandemic to over 20m. Death-toll also spiked to at least 3,417 new victims, Reuters reported. However, the numbers in reality are believed to be much higher as the country lacks the potential for exact counting and statistics. Medical experts reckon real numbers are 10 to 15 times higher. With pandemic crippling the health and social systems, thousands of infected are left outside of the official data.

The European plane maker Airbus announced it had launched the biggest restructuring of activities in its history to spur cost saving that was forced by the pandemic slump in demand, Reuters reported. The company started joining some operations across EU and in other cases even selling minor production activities, related to making of small details in Germany and France. "We are in the process of reviewing different ownership structures to identify the best possible solution," a spokesman said, referring to the new Germany-based detail-parts spin-off.

Confusion and complacency in addressing Covid-19 means the pandemic is a long way from over, but it can be brought under control in months with proven public health measures, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday, cited by Reuters.

Brazil registered over 4,000 deaths from Covid-19 on Tuesday alone, as the epidemic turns into what one expert calls a “biological Fukushima”, news wires reported. The exponential surge in the Latin American country is set to surpass the numbers seen within the US in January, when almost 80,000 people died from the disease.

Leaders of 23 countries and the World Health Organisation on Tuesday backed an idea to create an international treaty that would help the world deal with future health emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic now ravaging the globe, news wires reported.

Polling stations opened across the Netherlands on Monday in a general election that has been spread over three days to allow people to vote safely during the coronavirus pandemic, AP reported.

Dutch voters look set to give Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD Party a fresh four-year mandate in a national election on 15-17 March that is widely seen as a referendum on its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters writes.

Pandemic restrictions have completely or partly closed two-thirds of destinations worldwide to international tourism, according to the World Tourism Organisation (UNTWO), cited by news agencies.