LONDON – The pandemic is reaching deadly new heights around the world, the WHO warned this week, even though the focus in some countries, including the US, has shifted to how quickly restrictions can ease as vaccination rates rise.
“Across the world, cases and deaths are still rising at alarming rates,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WTO, said at a press conference on Friday. “Globally, the number of new cases per week has almost doubled in the last two months. This is closer to the highest infection rate we have seen so far during the pandemic. Some countries that previously avoided widespread spread are now seeing strong increases in infections.”
Most of the new infections have been seen in Brazil and India, the second and third countries worst affected. Earlier this week, the non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders warned that Brazil’s coronavirus response had driven the country to a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’. The group has responded to an effective, centralized response and until last week accounted for more than a quarter of the COVID-19 deaths worldwide.
Some experts have warned that recommendations on social distance in India are being ignored, and the government this week made a desperate plea for citizens to wear masks.
“If we all start wearing masks this morning or tomorrow, we will see an immediate dip in them,” Vinod Kumar Paul, a member of the government’s planning commission, told a news conference on April 13. “We must not crowd. We must maintain social distance and hygiene, then this virus will definitely stop. And we have repeatedly said that wearing a mask is an effective social vaccine, which we must start today.”
Of the 1,185 daily deaths report in India in the 24 hours preceding Friday, about a third were in the state of Maharashtra, home of Mumbai, which was placed under a lockout this week.
Nevertheless, the holy festival of Kumbh Mela caused millions of Indians to travel across the country, with footage bathing dedicated people in the Ganges without respect for social distance, and hundreds of positive cases were associated, according to the BBC. . In recent weeks, the country has reported more than 100,000 newly confirmed cases daily.
While the country is struggling to curb the spread of coronavirus, vaccine exports have been suspended at the country’s Serum Institute, which supplies most of the dose of AstraZeneca vaccine distributed through the COVAX program. According to the country’s health ministry, India has so far vaccinated more than 100 million citizens.
And in Europe, where most countries have accepted exclusions to deal with rising infection rates, WHO director Hans Kluge has announced that more than 1 million COVID-19 deaths have been exceeded in the European region.
“The situation in our region is serious – 1.6 million new cases are reported weekly,” he told a news conference on Thursday. “It’s 9,500 an hour, 160 people every minute. It’s just one of the oldest that is declining in appearance.”
On Monday, parts of the UK tentatively emerged from a month-long closure, with a dining room outside in pubs and restaurants, as well as shops, open to customers. Now the country reports some of the lowest proportional numbers of cases and deaths in Europe, which Prime Minister Boris Johnson wanted to emphasize were the work of lock-up – not vaccinations.
“But it is very important for everyone to understand that the reduction in these numbers – in hospitalizations and deaths and infections – has not been achieved through the vaccination program,” he said this week. “I do not think people appreciate that it is the exclusion that was predominantly important to deliver this improvement.”
Even countries that were initially praised for their handling of the pandemic, such as Germany, are now struggling, according to Reuters. German doctors acted to deal with deteriorating situations in hospitals, while Angela Merkel gained new powers to impose local closures if matters exceeded a certain threshold.
And while Britain is relaxing its exclusion laws, France entered a national exclusion earlier this month. The country became the third country in Western Europe – after the United Kingdom and Italy – to record more than 100,000 coronavirus deaths.