South Korea said on Friday it will drop all operating-hour curbs on restaurants and cafes and implement its first vaccine passport for high-risk venues such as gyms, saunas and bars, as it tries to "live with COVID-19".
The first phase will go into effect on Monday and last for a month, officials said, with plans calling for all restrictions to be scrapped by February.
"Beginning November 1, our community will take the first step of resuming our normal life," Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said at a televised government meeting.
"However, we must be aware that this doesn't mean the fight against coronavirus is over but a new beginning."
The UK's Office for National Statistics said on Friday that the prevalence of COVID-19 infections in England hit its highest level since the start of the year, reaching about one in 50 people in the week ending October 22.
The prevalence of infections rose for a fifth straight week, having been at one in 55 people in the previous week, the ONS said.
Prevalence was last at one in 50 people in the week ending January 2, shortly before England began a third lockdown.
The reproduction "R" number was also estimated to be slightly higher.
Since then, a vaccination program has largely broken the link between cases and deaths from COVID-19.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he plans to tolerate rising infections without resorting to a new lockdown.
The latest ONS infection survey covers the week when the UK reported more than 50,000 daily COVID-19 cases for the first time since July.
Coronavirus cases in Austria keep climbing, with 5861 infections reported in the past 24 hours, authorities said on Friday as new movement restrictions were imposed on some unvaccinated residents.
That is a jump from the seven-day moving average, which stands at about 4000 new cases per day.
The seven-day incidence has climbed to 313 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
Six districts with a total of about 260,000 residents will now require all those who have neither been vaccinated nor recovered from COVID-19 to undergo testing when leaving their district.
The district of Melk, about 90 kilometres west of Vienna, recorded a seven-day incidence of more than 1000 cases per 100,000 residents, a current high for the country.
With intensive care units becoming increasingly full, there is a threat of broader restrictions for the unvaccinated.
If bed occupancy in intensive care units rises significantly, unvaccinated people could no longer be allowed to go to bars or to cultural and sporting events, the government has said.
Under certain extreme conditions, they may not be allowed to leave their house at all without a valid reason.
Meanwhile, the authorities in the northern Chinese city of Heihe on Friday ordered a lockdown due to the latest outbreak of COVID-19 that has already led to the closure of two other cities.
In a statement published on the social network WeChat, the Heihe authorities said some city areas were at "medium risk" of contagion.
The city of 1.5 million residents near the border with Russia joins Ejin and Lanzhou confined for the last few days due to a country-wide outbreak that has infected more than 340 people.
The government has banned mass gatherings in the city and ordered only one person from a family to go outside every two days to buy essentials.
The government has also made fever checks mandatory for people entering public spaces.
They also need to install a COVID-19 monitoring app on mobile phones to check that a person is not infected or has not been in contact with infected people.
The local government, which has also restricted road traffic as a part of the lockdown, said city people needed to prepare to "fight a difficult battle".
The authorities had detected only ten positive cases in Heihe on Wednesday and hope that the lockdown measures will nip the spread in the bud.
with DPA and EFE
