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Global Covid cases dipped last week, deaths stable

LONDON: New coronavirus cases fell 9 percent globally last week while deaths remained stable, according to the latest weekly assessment of the Covid-19 pandemic from the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday.

The United Nations health agency said there were 6.5 million cases reported last week with more than 14,000 deaths. The number of new cases fell 35 percent in Europe but increased about 20 percent in the Western Pacific and 5 percent in Africa.

Deaths rose 44 percent in the Western Pacific and 26 percent in the Middle East, while falling about a quarter in Europe, it added.

The WHO previously warned that recent surveillance of Covid-19 has been severely compromised by countries reducing their testing, reporting and other coronavirus alert systems. The agency has said coronavirus figures are likely being significantly underestimated, which could make it more difficult to spot any worrisome new variant.

In the United Kingdom, the Office for National Statistics reported last week that Covid-19 cases dropped to about one in 20 people infected in England, suggesting that the latest wave of the coronavirus may have peaked in the Western European country.

Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said it was likely that Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations would continue to fall further in the following weeks.

Other experts warned that measures to prevent Covid-19 should still be taken, saying the health care system was still under pressure.

“We have to hope that the incidence of long Covid from this wave will be lower than in the first and second waves,” said James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the University of Oxford. He called for people to keep getting vaccinated even as Covid-19 protocols were abandoned, citing the dangers of reinfection.

In China, meanwhile, authorities last week shut down part of Wuhan, the city in central Hubei province where Covid-19 was first detected in December 2019, after identifying four cases. Beijing has suggested its zero-Covid strategy could last for years despite the social and economic upheaval the approach has caused.

The WHO said in its report that two versions of Omicron — subvariants BA.5 and BA.4 — were driving the latest wave of infections across the globe. It said BA.5 accounted for about 64 percent to 70 percent of sequences shared with the world’s largest public viral database.

The highest numbers of new cases were reported in Japan, the United States, South Korea, Germany and Italy. The most deaths were reported in the US, Brazil, Italy, Japan and Australia.

Americas And Emea

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2022-08-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-05T07:00:00.0000000Z

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The Manila Times