Hajj pilgrims streamed out of the holy city of Mecca Sunday, launching the rituals of the great pilgrimage which Saudi Arabia is holding in a scaled-down form for a second year to ward off coronavirus.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson will undertake "only essential government business" in the week ahead after he was designated a close contact of a person infected with Covid, Downing Street said Sunday.

Here are the latest developments in the coronavirus crisis:

- Five-fold rise? -The EU's disease agency predicts a sharp increase in cases, with nearly five times as many new infections by August 1. 

The Eiffel Tower reopened to visitors on Friday after nine months of shutdown caused by the Covid pandemic, the landmark's longest closure since World War II.

The lifts of the "Iron Lady" again whisked tourists to its 300-metre (1,000-foot) summit and its majestic views of the French capital as a marching band played.

Caretaker Health Minister Hamad Hassan said Friday the government would scrap subsidies on medicines costing less than 12,000 Lebanese pounds to shore up foreign currency reserves.

Hassan affirmed that the list of subsidized medicines includes medicines for chronic diseases, children’s formula milk, vaccines, as well as medicines to treat psychiatric and neurological diseases.

Pharmacies have announced an open-ended strike as of Friday over medicine shortages, “until the Ministry of Health approves the price indexes and provides protection for pharmacies.”

Pharmacists have been facing “daily harassments” that can be “life threatening” as a result of the shortage of medicines in pharmacies, the association of pharmacy owners stated.

The World Health Organization's emergency committee warned Thursday that new concerning variants of Covid-19 were expected to spread around the world, making it even harder to halt the pandemic.

"The pandemic is nowhere near finished," the committee said in a statement, highlighting "the strong likelihood for the emergence and global spread of new and possibly more dangerous variants of concern that may be even more challenging to control."

Britain's competition regulator announced Thursday it has imposed hundreds of millions of pounds in fines on several pharmaceutical firms for breaching the law in the supply of hydrocortisone tablets.

Saudi Arabia has arrested more than 120 people suspected of supplying or procuring fraudulent coronavirus vaccine and test certificates, official media said Thursday, two days before a tightly controlled hajj.

The Kremlin said Thursday that Moscow had no immediate plans to allow foreign coronavirus vaccines into Russia, despite the country's sluggish vaccination rates and rising death toll in a third wave of the pandemic.

Russia -- whose Sputnik V vaccine is not recognized by the EU -- is not currently discussing the "mutual recognition" of vaccines with Brussels, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.