Daily roundupSunday's key coronavirus developments from Luxembourg and abroad

Starting with Luxembourg

• Several hundred participants gathered outside of the Philharmonie building for today’s White March against coronavirus restrictions.

And abroad

• World governments rushed to contain a new, heavily mutated Covid-19 strain Sunday, with Israel slamming its borders shut to foreign nationals and Australia reporting its first cases of the variant.

• The novel coronavirus has killed at least 5,193,392 people since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP at 1100 GMT on Sunday.

• Relieved passengers on a flight from South Africa streamed into Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport Saturday, in stark contrast to the previous day when fears about a new Covid-19 variant sparked chaos.

• Online conspiracies continue to fuel Dutch Covid unrest.

• Britain’s government on Sunday defended the pace and scale of its response to the new Omicron strain of Covid-19 against criticism that it was again falling behind the curve.

• Right-winger Petr Fiala was named the Czech Republic’s new prime minister on Sunday in an unusual ceremony, with wheelchair-bound President Milos Zeman speaking from behind a plastic barrier because he has Covid-19.

• The new Covid variant Omicron has many more mutations than the Delta variant, according to a first “image” of this new variant initially detected in South Africa, produced and published by the prestigious Bambino Gesu hospital in Rome.