[ad_1]
LONDON: Daily reported coronavirus infections have been declining globally for a month and hit their lowest since mid-October on Tuesday, but health experts have warned of apathy even as vaccines are underway deployment worldwide.
Falls in infections and deaths coincide with lockdowns and severe restrictions on gatherings and movements as governments weigh the need to stop successive waves of the pandemic with the need to bring people back to work and children at school.
But optimism about the exit from the crisis has been tempered by new variants of the virus, raising fears about the effectiveness of vaccines.
“Now is not the time to let our guard down,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, World Health Organization technical officer on Covid-19, during a briefing in Geneva.
Covid-19 has hit some countries much harder than others, although the differences in how infections are counted locally make it impossible to make a perfect comparison from apples to apples.
There were 351,335 new infections reported globally on Tuesday over an average of seven days, the figure rising from 863,737 as of January 7. There were 17,649 deaths on January 26, and 10,957 on February 16.
Infections are declining in the United States, with 77,883 new infections reported on average every day. That’s 31% of the peak of the highest daily average reported on January 8.
There have been 27,902,387 coronavirus-related infections and 490,795 reported in the United States since the start of the pandemic, the highest numbers in the world.
So far, 85 countries have started immunizing people against the coronavirus and have administered at least 187,892,000 doses.
Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory at the southern end of Spain, is the world leader and has administered enough doses of the vaccine to 40% of its population, assuming each person needs two doses .
Posted in Dawn on February 19, 2021
Source link
