Highlights: 5 new coronavirus deaths in Uttarakhand, tally crosses 8K mark

Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan discharged from Bhopal's Chirayu Hospital after recovering from Covid-19 on Wednesday.

India's Covid-19 infections spiked to 1,908,254 on Wednesday after registering 52,509 new cases. While 857 others succumbed to the disease.

Britons spent 40% of their day watching TV and online video during the lockdown period, research by Ofcom showed.

Adults, who were advised by the government in late March to stay at home, spent on average six hours and 25 minutes a day watching news and entertainment, Ofcom said, a rise of almost a third on the same month a year ago.

According to the report, people also spent twice as long watching streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.

US health and human services secretary Alex Azar will visit Taiwan to discuss the international response to the Covid-19 pandemic, reports Bloomberg.

Australia's Queensland state to close its border with New South Wales state, to prevent the second wave of Covid-19 infection.

Australia has withstood the pandemic much better than most other countries, with 18,729 cases and 232 deaths in a population of 25 million.

Bill Gates, whose foundation has pledged more than $250 million toward Covid-19 research, said the US must take a more global approach in making vaccines available. While the US leads in research, “we’ve only taken care of ourselves” in producing and procuring a vaccine, he said in an interview.

Oil prices fell for the first time in four days on Wednesday, pulling back from as much as five-month highs as mounting coronavirus cases worldwide and in the United States undercut market confidence in a pickup in fuel demand, according to news agency Reuters.

Novavax Inc said on Tuesday its experimental Covid-19 vaccine produced high levels of antibodies against the coronavirus disease, according to initial data from a small, early-stage clinical trial.

The firm said it could start a large pivotal Phase III trial as soon as late September, and added that it could produce 1 billion to 2 billion doses of the vaccine in 2021.

As many as 698,232 people have died of the coronavirus disease in world so far, with most deaths being reported from the United States (156,753), followed by Brazil (95,819), and Mexico (48,012).