Bloomberg Quicktake: Now published this video item, entitled “Global Covid Cases Hit Record High Last Week, WHO Says” – below is their description.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday a record 9.5 million cases of the coronavirus were tallied around the world over the last week, noting a 71% surge in the weekly count of infections amounting to a “tsunami” as the new omicron variant sweeps worldwide.
“Last week, the highest number of COVID-19 cases were reported so far in the pandemic,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
He said the WHO was certain that was an underestimate because of a backlog in testing around the year-end holidays.
The U.N. health agency, in its weekly report on the pandemic, said the weekly count amounted to 9,520,488 new cases and over 41 000 new deaths were reported during the last week.
While omicron appears to be less severe than the delta variant, especially among people who have been vaccinated, Tedros said vaccine equity was key to the global challenge of the pandemic.
The WHO said the rises in case counts over the last week varied, doubling in the Americas region, but rising only 7% in Africa.
The organization’s emergencies chief, Dr Michael Ryan, said speculation omicron might be the last variant of the outbreak was “wishful thinking” and cautioned there was still “a lot of energy in this virus.”
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19, added she thought it was “very unlikely that omicron will be the last variant that you will hear us discussing.”
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