Paris (AFP)

The pandemic caused by the coronavirus has decelerated for the fifth consecutive week in the world, particularly in Asia and Europe: here are the significant 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.

- About 466,000 daily cases -

With 466,400 contaminations recorded daily in the world this week, the indicator has fallen again (-15% compared to the previous week), according to an AFP report stopped on Thursday.

The indicator began to grow continuously from February 20, after an unprecedented drop of more than a month at the start of the year, which had seen contaminations halved, around 355,000 daily cases.

It has been declining for over a month.

- Sharp declines in Asia and Europe -

The pandemic slowed significantly in Asia (-28%) and Europe (-13%) this week.

These two zones contain six of the seven biggest decelerations of the week.

The sharpest decline is observed in Sweden (-36%, 1,200 new cases per day), ahead of Nepal (-35%, 5,000), India (-33%, 153,200), Bahrain (-32%, 2,200 ), Italy (-31%, 2,700), Ukraine (-30%, 2,300) and Japan (-29%, 3,200).

The pandemic also decelerated sharply in the United States / Canada (-28%) this week and slowed slightly in the Middle East (-6%), while it accelerated in Oceania (+ 51%), Africa (+ 18%) and in Latin America / Caribbean (+ 5%).

- Main accelerations -

Afghanistan is the country where the epidemic is accelerating the most (+ 86%, 1,100 new cases per day), among the countries that have recorded at least 1,000 daily infections during the past week.

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The United Kingdom (+ 42%, 3,700), Bolivia (+ 41%, 3,100, Mexico (+ 35%, 3,000) and the Philippines (+ 35%, 6,800) follow.

- The most contaminations -

India, despite a further deceleration of contaminations, remains, by far, the country having recorded the greatest number of new contaminations in absolute value this week (153,300 daily cases), ahead of Brazil (65,900, + 3%), l 'Argentina (31,600, + 2%), Colombia (24,100, + 19%) and the United States (16,000, -29%).

In proportion to the population, the country with the most cases this week remains the Maldives archipelago (1,151 per 100,000 inhabitants), ahead of Bahrain (897) and Uruguay (692).

- Death -

India also leads the rankings for daily deaths (3,300 per day this week), ahead of Brazil (1,800), Mexico (815), Argentina (530) and Colombia (520).

Globally, daily deaths fell this week (11,165 per day, -5%).

© 2021 AFP