Hospitals in Turkey and Poland are filling up. Pakistan is restricting domestic travel. The U.S. government will send more aid to Michigan, the state with the largest increase in coronavirus infections in the country.
The global increase in cases and deaths from COVID-19 includes Thailand, which has withstood the pandemic much better than other nations, but now has trouble containing it.
The only exceptions to the situation are countries with advanced vaccination programs, basically Israel and Britain. The United States is also seeing an increase in new cases even though it is a global leader in vaccination, and the White House said Friday it would send federal assistance to Michigan to control the state’s worst infection rate in the country.
The World Health Organization indicated that infections are on the rise in all regions of the planet, driven by new virus variants and because in many countries the population left confinement too soon.
“We’ve seen increases (of cases) around the world for six weeks. And now, sadly, we’re seeing increases in deaths over the last three weeks,” WHO spokeswoman Dr. Margaret Harris said at a meeting with the press in Geneva.
In its weekly epidemiological update, the agency has indicated that more than 4 million cases of COVID-19 were reported in the last week. Deaths increased 11% from the previous week, with more than 71,000 reported.
The increase in infections, hospitalizations and deaths is spreading to countries where vaccination is finally gaining momentum. This makes the outlook even worse for much of the world, where large-scale inoculation programs remain a distant reality.
One of the countries most affected is Turkey, where most new cases of coronavirus are related to a variant first detected in Britain.
Ismail Cinel, director of the Turkish Intensive Care Association, said the increase in cases is beginning to put pressure on the country’s relatively advanced health system, and “alarms are sounding” for intensive care units , which are not yet saturated.
“The mutant form of virus is causing more damage to organs,” Cinel noted. “Before 2 out of 10 patients died; now the figure is 4 out of 10. And if we continue like this, we will lose 6.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan eased restrictions on COVID-19 in March to reduce damage to the country’s economy. But the new rise forced him to announce new restrictions, such as weekend confinements and the closure of cafes and restaurants during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, which begins on April 13th.
In the U.S. capital, President Joe Biden’s government outlined how the federal government plans to help Michigan better administer vaccines that have already been assigned to the state, as well as expand diagnostic testing capacity and availability. drugs. Support will not include more vaccines.
For its part, Brazil has the second highest total death toll in the world, surpassed only by the United States. In Sao Paulo, night burials have had to be carried out in order to cope with demand, and school buses have been used to transport coffins. The rate of vaccination is advancing slowly – less than 3% of the 210 million Brazilians have received the two doses, according to the research portal Our World in data – and some state governors have expressed concern about supplies.
Pakistan is in the midst of a third wave of contagion, and its rulers will restrict transportation to cities on weekends from Friday to midnight.
In Thailand, authorities ordered new restrictions to try to contain the contagions.
Poland has suffered a drastic increase in deaths, and hospitals have been forced to reject patients with cancer and other diseases because intensive care units and other areas are full of VOCID-19 patients. Coronavirus hospitalizations have increased 20% in the last two weeks.