(Washington) The United States, facing a worrying fifth wave of COVID-19 fueled by the Omicron variant, on Tuesday recorded a record average of 265,427 new cases every day since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The seven-day average of daily cases in the country, the most bereaved in the world, exceeded the previous peak recorded in the third wave, in January 2021, to nearly 252,000 cases.
Omicron is now the dominant variant in the United States according to the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). It accounted for about 59% of new cases in the week ending December 25.
This federal public health agency has also sharply revised downward its estimates for the previous week (ended December 18): it had previously reported a 73% proportion of Omicron, now corrected to 22.5% .
“We have had more data coming in over this period, and there has been a reduction in the proportion of Omicron,” a CDC spokeswoman told AFP, attributing this large gap in part to the speed with which spreads Omicron.
“It is important to note that we are still seeing a continuous increase in the proportion of Omicron,” she stressed.
The curve for new infections, which was down between early September and late October after a fourth wave linked to the Delta variant, has started to rise again for two months and is now climbing sharply with the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
“It will be a rapid wave, but very difficult”, estimated Tuesday on Twitter the epidemiologist at Harvard Michael Mina, who also judged that the record number of contaminations recorded was only the “tip of the iceberg”, due to the number of undetected or unreported cases.
For now, while the hospitalization curve is also on the rise, with around 9,000 new COVID-19 patients hospitalized daily in the United States, this is still a far cry from the 16,500 daily hospitalizations recorded in early January 2021, data shows. of the CDC.
Around 1,200 people die on average now from COVID-19 in the country – a year ago the peak was around 3,400 daily deaths.
The world has reached new contamination records over the past week, with more than 935,000 cases of COVID-19 detected every day on average from December 22 to 28, according to an AFP count made from official reports.