The COVID-19 pandemic began a decline in the world this week, after three and a half months of outbreak: here are the significant weekly developments, from an AFP database.
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Important indicator, the number of cases diagnosed only reflects a fraction of the real number of contaminations and comparisons between countries should be taken with caution, as testing policies differ greatly from one country to another.
For statistics by country, the analysis is limited to those with at least 500,000 inhabitants whose incidence rate exceeds 50 weekly cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
More than 3 million daily cases
With 3.03 million contaminations recorded every day worldwide, the indicator is falling for the first time (-10% compared to the previous week) after fifteen weeks of increase, according to an AFP report stopped on Thursday.
All regions breathe
This week, most regions of the world are seeing their situation improve. This is the case for the United States/Canada zone (-38%), Africa (-21%), Asia (-16%), the Latin America/Caribbean zone (-13% ) and the Middle East (-4%).
The situation is virtually stable in Europe (+1%).
In Oceania, the sharp increase in contamination this week (+78%) is entirely due to a catch-up in Australia. Without this catch-up, daily cases actually drop by about 10%.
Main accelerations
Iran is the country that recorded the biggest acceleration of the week (+233% compared to the previous week, 27,200 new daily cases).
This is followed by the Solomon Islands (+138%, 200), Armenia (+137%, 3,000), Azerbaijan (+133%, 4,700) and South Korea (+100%, 18,500).
Main declines
The Dominican Republic is this week the country with the largest weekly decline (-65%, 1,300), ahead of Nepal (-55%, 3,300), Argentina (-51%, 44,000), Jamaica (-50%, 400) and Morocco (-49%, 3,100).
The most contamination
The United States remains the country with the highest number of new infections in absolute value this week (362,800 daily cases, -39%), ahead of France (289,200, -20%) and India (204,500 , -33%). However, these three countries are experiencing a sharp drop in contamination.
As a proportion of population, the country with the most new cases this week is Denmark (5,337 per 100,000 inhabitants), ahead of Slovenia (5,112), Israel (4,497), Georgia (3,508) and Portugal (3,455).
Death
Globally, the number of daily deaths increased sharply for the fourth consecutive week (+16%), to 10,507 deaths per day.
But while the Omicron wave recorded, at its peak, four times more daily contaminations than at the height of the previous waves, the daily deaths remain much lower than their record of January 2021, when they had flirted with the 15,000.
The United States has the highest number of daily deaths in absolute value, 2,576 per day this week, ahead of India (1,040) and Brazil (702).
As a proportion of population, the country with the most deaths over the past week is again Bosnia and Herzegovina (11.0 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants), ahead of Croatia (8.9), North Macedonia North (8.7), Montenegro and Bulgaria (8.0 each).