Infection continues to rise worldwide, and deaths do not

The COVID-19 pandemic continued to rage around the world this week, but deaths kept falling: Here are the staggering weekly trends, taken from AFP’s databases.

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As an important indicator, the number of diagnosed cases only reflects a fraction of the actual number of infections, and comparisons between countries should be taken with caution, as testing policies differ from country to country.

For country statistics, the analysis is limited to countries with a population of at least 500,000 and whose incidence exceeds 50 cases per 100,000 inhabitants per week.

With a new record of 1.94 million infections recorded every day in the world, the index jumped again this week (+64% compared to the previous week), according to an AFP report that stopped Thursday.

While the highly contagious variant Omicron is now present in most countries, contamination is rising in all regions: in Oceania (+259%), in Latin America/Caribbean (+143%), in the Middle East. East (+ 110%), in Asia (+ 109%), in the USA / Canada (+ 69%), in Europe (+ 51%) and Africa (+ 3%).

Guyana (+653% over the previous week, 400 new cases per day) is the country with the largest acceleration in the week among those whose infection rate exceeded 50 weekly cases per 100,000 population.

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Kuwait (+464%, 1,300), Mauritania (+452%, 700), Suriname (+419%, 500) and Dominican Republic (+375%, 3100) follow.

This week, dozens of countries around the world have seen their cases double or more, including countries as large as India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines and Italy.

Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) is the country with the strongest decline this week (-50%, 200), ahead of Namibia (-32%, 500), Comoros (-29%, 100), Russia (-24%, 17, 400) ) and South Korea (-23%, 4,000).

Eswatini and Namibia, located in southern Africa, were among the first countries to be hit by a wave of variable pollution from Omicron in early December.

The US remains, by far, the country with the most new infections in absolute terms this week (595,200 daily cases, +70%), ahead of France (206,100, +70%) and the UK (181,000, +30%) .

As a percentage of the population, the country with the highest number of new cases this week is Cyprus (3,468 per 100,000 inhabitants), ahead of Ireland (2,840), Greece (2,415), Montenegro (2371) and Denmark (2,362).

Globally, despite the outbreak of cases, the number of daily deaths remains low (-3%) to 6,172 deaths per day.

The United States has the most daily deaths in absolute terms, 1,357 deaths per day this week, ahead of Russia (838) and Poland (414).

As a percentage of the population, the countries with the highest number of deaths in the past week are Trinidad and Tobago (10.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants), Georgia (8.1), Poland (7, 7), Bulgaria (7.0) and Croatia (6.6). .