Covid-19 deaths and cases are on the rise again around the world, signalling yet another round of restrictions and dampening hopes for a return to normalcy.
According to the World Health Organization, deaths increased last week after nine weeks of decline. It recorded more than 55,000 deaths, a 3% increase from the previous week.
According to WHO, the number of cases increased by 10% last week to nearly 3 million, with the highest numbers recorded in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom.
Low vaccination rates, the relaxation of mask rules and other precautions, and the rapid spread of the more contagious delta variant, which has now been identified in 111 countries and is expected to become globally dominant in the coming months, have all been blamed for the reversal.
According to Sarah McCool, a public health professor at Georgia State University, the combination is a “recipe for a potential tinderbox.”
“It’s important that we recognize that Covid has the potential for explosive outbreaks,’’ warned Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University.
The death toll in Argentina’s hard-hit country has surpassed 100,000 as a result of the surge. This week, daily coronavirus deaths in Russia reached new highs. Covid-19 infections among the young in Belgium have nearly doubled in the last week, thanks to the delta variant. For the first time in six months, Britain saw more than 40,000 new cases in a single day.
Crematoriums are open from dawn to dusk in Myanmar. People near Jakarta are pitching in to help gravediggers keep up after Indonesia recorded nearly 1,000 deaths and over 54,000 new cases on Wednesday, up from around 8,000 cases per day a month ago.
“As the diggers are too tired and do not have enough resources to dig, the residents in my neighborhood decided to help,” Jaya Abidin said. “Because if we do not do this, we will have to wait in turn a long time for a burial.”
Newly confirmed infections per day in the United States, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, have doubled in the last two weeks to around 24,000, though deaths are still on the decline at around 260 per day.
Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, reported more than 1,000 new cases for the fifth day in a row on Tuesday.
Tokyo is in its fourth state of emergency, with infections on the rise and hospital beds quickly filling up ahead of the Summer Games later this month. Experts predict that caseloads will exceed 1,000 before the Olympics and reach thousands during the games.
