LONDON (Reuters) – Daily coronavirus infections have been falling worldwide for a month now and on Tuesday have reached their lowest point since mid-October, Reuters figures show, but experts at health warned against apathy even when vaccines are being rolled out around the world.
Falls of infections and deaths coincide with severe blockages and frequencies in meetings and movements, as governments weigh the need to stop the successive waves of pandemic with the need to get people back to work and children to work. ‘school.
But optimism about the way out of the crisis has been moderated by new variants of the virus, which raises fears about the effectiveness of vaccines.
“Now is not the time to drop the guard,” Maria Van Kerkhove, technical head of COVID-19 at the World Health Organization, said at a briefing in Geneva.
“… We can’t let ourselves get into a situation where we’re increasing cases again.”
COVID-19 has affected some countries much more than others, although differences in how to count infections locally make it impossible to make a perfect comparison between apples and apples.
On Tuesday, 351,335 new infections were recorded worldwide in an average of seven days, a figure that rose from 863,737 on January 7th. On January 26, there were 17,649 deaths, which rose to 10,957 on February 16.
COVID-19 infections are declining in the United States, with an average of 77,883 new infections reported each day. This represents 31% of the peak, the highest daily average since January 8.
There have been 27,902,387 infections and 490,795 coronavirus-related deaths in the United States since the pandemic began, the highest figures in the world.
To date, 85 countries have begun vaccinating people against the coronavirus and have administered at least 187,892,000 doses, according to Reuters figures.
Gibraltar, a British overseas territory located in the extreme south of Spain, leads the world and has administered enough doses of vaccine to 40% of its population, assuming each person needs two doses.
((Interactive graphical tracking of global coronavirus spread: open tmsnrt.rs/2FThSv7 in an external browser))
Report by Nick Macfie and Josephine Mason