Coronavirus updates: Herd immunity by fall 'ambitious,' says surgeon general nominee

Vatican City began offering free COVID-19 vaccinations to Rome's homeless community on Wednesday, according to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.

The vaccinations took place in the atrium of the Paul VI Audience Hall, the massive auditorium where the Pope holds his weekly general audiences. An initial group of around 25 homeless individuals, who are all looked after in facilities run by the Office of Papal Charities, received their first doses of the vaccine Wednesday morning, according to Bruni.

"Further groups are to follow in the coming days," Bruni said in a statement.

Vatican City, an independent enclave surrounded by Rome that serves as the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, launched a COVID-19 immunization campaign last week, administering doses of a vaccine developed by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech. The tiny city-state has a population of only around 800 people but employs more than 4,000.

Both Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, have received their first doses of the vaccine.

The vaccination campaign is voluntary and people under the age of 18 are being excluded for the time being, according to Bruni.

Since the start of the pandemic, Vatican City has reported at least 27 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to a real-time count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

ABC News' Phoebe Natanson contributed to this report.

Some hospitals in the United Kingdom look "like a war zone" as doctors and nurses workers grapple with an influx of COVID-19 patients, according to Patrick Vallance, the British government's chief scientific adviser.

"It may not look like it when you go for a walk in the park, but when you go into a hospital, this is very, very bad at the moment with enormous pressure and in some cases it looks like a war zone in terms of the things that people are having to deal with," Vallance told Sky News in an interview Wednesday.

He said there have been "huge numbers" of COVID-19 cases in recent days and that the country's health care system "is under enormous pressure at the moment." Official figures show nearly 38,000 people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 across the U.K.

Vallance's comments come after the U.K. reported a record 1,610 additional deaths from COVID-19 on Tuesday, as the cumulative total approaches 100,000. Since the start of the pandemic, the country has confirmed more than 3.4 million cases of the disease, including more than 91,000 fatalities, according to the latest data published on the British government's website.

The U.K. -- -- an island nation of 66 million people made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- has the fifth-highest number of diagnosed cases worldwide and the fourth-highest death toll, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University.

Zimbabwe’s minister of foreign affairs and international trade, Sibusiso Moyo, has died from COVID-19, officials said. He was 61.

Moyo "succumbed to COVID-19 at a local hospital" early Wednesday morning, according to a statement from presidential spokesman George Charamba.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa took to Twitter to confirm the news and post a photo of Moyo.

"Zimbabwe has lost a devoted public servant and a true hero, and I have lost a friend. He fought his entire life so that Zimbabwe could be free," Mnangagwa tweeted. "May he rest in peace."

Moyo gained recognition in November 2017 as the army general who announced on national television that the Zimbabwean military had placed then-President Robert Mugabe under house arrest, while insisting it was not a coup. The move ended Mugabe's 37-year rule and Moyo was appointed to Mnangagwa's cabinet when he took power with military backing.

Zimbabwe has recently seen a surge in COVID-19 infections amid fears of a new, more contagious variant of the novel coronavirus that emerged in neighboring South Africa. Zimbabwe has confirmed more than 28,000 cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, including at least 825 deaths, according to the latest data from the Africas Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More than 15.7 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the United States to date, according to data published on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website.

Over 13.5 million people have received one or more doses of the vaccine, while more than 2 million have received two doses, according to the CDC data, which was updated Tuesday.