Officials sought to ease concerns in Europe on Sunday about deliveries of coronavirus vaccines as nations across the world doubled down on restrictions to fight the rampaging pandemic.

US President-elect Joe Biden announced Friday he would surge federal resources into making "thousands" of vaccine sites, while also deploying mobile clinics and expanding the public health workforce to accelerate the rollout of Covid-19 shots.

Mexico reeled Thursday from its worst week of the pandemic yet, with deaths averaging nearly 1,000 a day and a health system that was close to reaching a breaking point.

Amazonas state in northern Brazil on Thursday announced a 10-day curfew to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus, as cases soar and hospitals run out of beds and oxygen.

Germany's total coronavirus cases topped two million on Friday, as Chancellor Angela Merkel pushed for a "significant" tightening of restrictions to slow the infection rate.

The number of people inoculated in Israel for coronavirus passed the two million threshold Thursday, with the prime minister saying there was "light at the end of the tunnel."

The French government will impose a daily nationwide curfew at 6 pm starting Saturday to combat a worrying increase in Covid-19 cases, Prime Minister Jean Castex said on Thursday.

A full lockdown started in Lebanon Thursday, with residents barred even from grocery shopping and dependent on food deliveries, in a bid to slow a surge in novel coronavirus cases.

The new restrictions were only loosely respected in some areas of the country, however, after mass protests in recent years against a political elite held responsible for a deepening economic crisis.

It was a choice between containing a spiraling virus outbreak and resuscitating a dying economy in a country that has been in steady financial and economic meltdown over the past year. Authorities in Lebanon chose the latter.

Now, virus patients struggling to breathe wait outside hospitals -- hoping for a bed or even a chair to open up. Ordinary people share contact lists of oxygen suppliers on social media as the the critical gas becomes scarce, and the sound of ambulances ferrying the ill echoes through Beirut. Around 500 of Lebanon's 14,000 doctors have left the crisis-ridden country in recent months, according to the Order of Physicians, putting a further strain on existing hospital staff.

Dr. Firass Abiad, the Manager and CEO of state-run Rafik Hariri University Hospital, warned Thursday that an 11-day strict lockdown that has been imposed to curb a huge spike in Covid-19 cases “should not fail.”

“In the last 24 hours alone, four Covid positive patients presented in cardiac arrest to our emergency room,” Abiad tweeted.