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Switzerland has tasked its defense ministry with securing enough COVID-19 vaccine, the government said on Wednesday, amid growing fears that some countries could be left short of supplies when the medicine is eventually produced.

SoftBank Group-backed Indian ride-hailing company Ola will cut 1,400 jobs, or about 35% of its workforce, as it navigates a strict coronavirus lockdown that has halted 95% of its business, company chief Bhavish Aggarwal told employees on Wednesday.

When a group of villagers in the Ecuadorean fishing community of El Real came down with coughs and fevers in early April, nobody was sure if they had the coronavirus - and no health workers were available to diagnose or treat them.

The city of Wuhan, the original epicentre of China's coronavirus outbreak, conducted 856,128 tests for the disease on Tuesday, the local health authority said on Wednesday, compared with 467,847 a day earlier.

Luxembourg began mass testing for COVID-19 this week with the goal of covering all of its 600,000 people as soon as possible to stave off a second wave of infections following the easing of lockdown measures.

Contract drug manufacturer Lonza still expects to supply drugmaker Moderna with active ingredients for its experimental COVID-19 vaccine by June or July to support laboratory trials, the Swiss company's interim CEO, Albert Baehny, told CNBC on Wednesday.

A Pakistani local legislator died on Wednesday after contracting COVID-19, hospital officials said, marking the first death of a political figure in the South Asian nation from the disease at a time the country has lifted its countrywide lockdown.

The regulation of big technology companies such as Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google has been a hot button issue ahead of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3.

The idea of testing the BCG vaccine in Africa against COVID-19 was bound to cause controversy, yet officials say efforts underway could, if successful, give the continent a cheap and easily deployable weapon against the virus.

AT&T Inc said on Tuesday it was shutting its DirecTV subscription access to Venezuela due to U.S. sanctions, cutting off a key source of entertainment for millions of people stuck in their homes under a strict coronavirus quarantine.

German business software group SAP expects to stick to its dividend policy even as the coronavirus crisis weighs on its results, its finance chief said on Wednesday.

Johnson & Johnson on Tuesday announced it would stop selling its talc Baby Powder in the United States and Canada, saying demand had dropped in the wake of what it called "misinformation" about the product’s safety amid a barrage of legal challenges.

Before she died in a Moscow hospital earlier this month, Liubov Kashaeva, 74, twice tested positive for the new coronavirus. Her death was not attributed to the virus, however. It was put down to the cancer she had been suffering from.

Xiaomi Corp reported a 13.6% rise in first-quarter revenue on Wednesday, beating estimates even as demand for its smartphones plunged amid the coronavirus pandemic that has also rattled supply chains in China.

The novel coronavirus is behaving differently in patients in northeast China who have contracted it recently compared with early cases, indicating it is changing as it spreads, a prominent doctor said.

Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

Malaysia's health ministry reported 31 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, taking the cumulative total to 7,009 infections.

The world's biggest credit data firm Experian Plc on Wednesday reported higher annual revenue as it benefited from greater demand for its analytics products in North and Latin American markets, sending shares to a more-than-10-week high.

SoftBank Group-backed Indian ride-hailing company Ola will cut 1,400 jobs, or about 35% of its workforce, as it tries to navigate the coronavirus crisis, its chief executive officer said in a note to employees.

Russia's coronavirus case tally, the second highest in the world, passed 300,000 on Wednesday, but a representative from the World Health Organisation (WHO) said the situation was starting to stabilise.