Delta variant which also threatened Africa with a brutal third wave. The centre of Australia's largest city Sydney entered lockdown, a shock for a population that had returned to relative normality after months of recording very few local cases, while vaccination success story Israel reimposed indoor mask-wearing less than two weeks after it lifted the measure.
And in Fiji, another country that saw early successes against the virus, health authorities admitted for the first time that Covid transmission is widespread in the community.
While vaccination campaigns have helped bring down infections in numerous -- mostly wealthy -- countries, the rise of the Delta variant which first emerged in India has led to fears of new waves of a virus