Paris (AFP)

The pandemic continued its marked deceleration this week around the world, with new coronavirus contaminations being half as numerous as at the beginning of January: here are the striking weekly developments, taken from an AFP database.

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

- Less than 400,000 daily cases -

With 362,000 contaminations recorded daily this week, the indicator continues its fall that began a little over a month ago, according to an AFP report stopped on Thursday.

New contaminations have continued to decline (-12% this week) since the record of 743,000 new daily cases reached during the week of January 5 to 11.

They drop to their lowest level for four months (week of October 12 to 18).

Since the peak in early January, new contaminations globally have been halved (-51%).

Never since the start of the pandemic has the indicator experienced such a sharp and prolonged drop.

- Declines everywhere, except in the Middle East -

This week, only the Middle East experienced an acceleration of the contagion (+ 11%).

All other regions experienced slowdowns: -28% in the United States / Canada, -9% in Africa, Asia and Europe and -7% in Latin America / Caribbean.

The virus hardly circulates in Oceania (13 cases per day).

- Strongest declines -

This week, the sharpest decline is again observed in Portugal (-51%, 2,100 new cases per day).

At the start of the year, Portugal remained for several weeks the country with the most contamination in proportion to its population.

The curve has fallen sharply for three weeks, thanks to a containment that entered into force on January 15.

Following are Bolivia (-41%, 800 new cases daily), Spain (-37%, 11,500), the United States (-28%, 72,800) and Colombia (-26%, 4,700).

In the United States, new daily cases have been divided by three since the peak observed during the week of January 5 to 11.

But the fall observed in South Africa is even more impressive, contaminations (1,980 daily cases this week) having been divided by 10 over the period.

- Main accelerations -

Iraq, a country struggling with the British variant deemed to be the most contagious of the coronavirus, is for the second consecutive week the country where the epidemic is accelerating the most (+ 62%, 2,900 new cases per day).

Faced with this new wave, the country has just established a nighttime curfew during the week and total containment on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Jordan (+ 44%, 2,100), Hungary (+ 23%, 1,700), Poland (+ 18%, 6,300) and Austria (+ 15%, 1,500) follow.

The ten strongest accelerations of the week were recorded in the Middle East and Europe.

- The most contaminations -

Despite a sharp drop (-28%), the United States remains the country with the highest number of new infections this week, with 72,800 new daily cases, ahead of Brazil (45,200, stable) and France (18,600, - 2%).

As a proportion of the population, excluding micro-states, the Czech Republic is the country with the most cases this week (544 per 100,000 inhabitants), ahead of Montenegro (512) and Israel (394).

- Death -

The United States has recorded the most deaths in the past week (2,566 per day on average), ahead of Brazil (1,037), Mexico (982), the United Kingdom (551) and Russia (463) .

© 2021 AFP