WHO: COVID-19 cases, deaths drop globally

Today the World Health Organization (WHO) said global COVID-19 cases were down 11% in the week ending on Sep 25, and deaths were down 18% compared to the previous week.In a weekly update on the pandemic, the WHO said new cases of the virus dropped or remained relatively stable across all six WHO regions, with the biggest decrease in Africa (-33%), and the smallest decrease in Europe (-1%).The most new weekly cases were reported by Japan (535,502 new cases, down 12% from the previous week), the United States (361,599, down 11%), Russia (353,826, down 5%), China (292,476, similar to the previous week) and Germany (249,144, an increase of 9%)."Current trends in reported COVID-19 cases and deaths should be interpreted with caution, as several countries have been progressively changing COVID-19 testing strategies, resulting in lower overall numbers of tests performed and consequently lower numbers of cases detected," the WHO said.Omicron is still the main variant of concern, representing 99.9% of cases reported globally in the past week.According to the WHO, BA.5 Omicron descendent lineages continue to account for 81.2% of sequences, which is up from 76.6% in last week's report.

Those are followed by BA.4 descendent lineages (including BA.4.6) which account for 8.1%, and BA.2 descendent lineages (including BA.2.75), which account for 2.9% of sequences.The global COVID totals are 616,275,830 cases and 6,540,285 deaths.Japanese antiviral proves successful in trialsJapan's Shionogi & Co said today its antiviral protease inhibitor known as ensitrelvir performed well compared with a placebo in phase 3 trials, and was able to reduce symptoms from Omicron-caused infections.The trial was conducted on primarily vaccinated people with