Led mainly by surges in Asian hot spots, COVID-19 cases last week increased for the second straight week, though deaths continued to fall, the World Health Organization (WHO) said yesterday in its weekly pandemic update.Death spikes reflect risk to vulnerable groupsLast week marked a turnaround in a 5-week decline in cases.
In the continued rise this week, cases were up 7% compared to the week before, the WHO said. Cases were up 21% in the Western Pacific region, an area that includes locations experiencing surges, including South Korea, Vietnam, and Hong Kong.The European region's cases remained steady, while levels declined in the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, South East Asia, and Americas regions.Deaths overall declined 23% compared to the week before, though they were up 5% in the Western Pacific region.The WHO received reports of 12 million cases last week.
Countries reporting the most cases were South Korea, Vietnam, Germany, France, and Australia. Also, there were 33,000 deaths across the globe, with Russia nudging ahead of the United States in reporting the most weekly fatalities.At a briefing today, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, said several countries are now experiencing their highest death rates of the pandemic, which he said reflects the speed of Omicron spread and the heightened risk in unvaccinated people, especially seniors."We all want to move on from the pandemic.
But no matter how much we wish it away, this pandemic is not over," Tedros said. "Until we reach high vaccination coverage in all countries, we will continue to face the risk of infections surging, and new variants emerging that evade vaccines."Over the last month, 99.8% of sequenced SARS-CoV-2 samples were the Omicron