Covid-19: the pandemic continued to decline around the world this week

2022-02-18T12:17:15.744Z

The Covid-19 pandemic continued its sharp decline this week, with contamination decelerating in most regions of the world: here are the significant weekly developments, from a database…

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 care, 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.

Less than two million daily cases

With 1.97 million contaminations recorded every day worldwide, the indicator drops sharply for the third consecutive week (-22% compared to the previous week) after fifteen weeks of increase, according to an AFP report stopped at Thursday.

Declines in most regions

This week, most regions of the world are seeing their situation improve: -43% in the United States/Canada zone, -35% in the Middle East, -23% in Europe and in the Latin America/Caribbean zone, and -22% in Africa.

Covid-19: global assessment AFP

The situation remained almost stable in Asia (-1%) and Oceania (+1%).

Main accelerations

All the strongest accelerations of the week are concentrated in Southeast Asia and Oceania.

New Zealand is the country that recorded the biggest acceleration of the week (+239% compared to the previous week, 900 new daily cases), ahead of Hong Kong (+192%, 1,800), Malaysia (+111% , 22,100), Vietnam (+78%, 32,200) and South Korea (+66%, 65,800).

Main declines

Sweden is this week the country having recorded the largest weekly decline (-78%, 4,100), ahead of Kazakhstan (-59%, 1,700), Kosovo (-57%, 500), Colombia (-55%, 4,700) and Suriname (-54%, 100).

The most contamination

Russia becomes the country having recorded the highest number of new contaminations in absolute value this week (187,500 daily cases, +6%), dethroning the United States (119,600, -44%) which goes to third place.

Germany (180,900, -6%) is in second place.

Patients bedridden outside the Caritas medical center due to a new wave of the virus, in Hong Kong on February 18, 2022 Peter PARKS AFP

As a proportion of the population, the country with the most new cases is again Denmark (5,026 per 100,000 inhabitants) this week, ahead of Latvia (3,635), the Netherlands (2,877), Georgia (2,851) and Estonia (2,777).

Death

Globally, the number of daily deaths is beginning to decline (-7%, 10,355 deaths per day) after five consecutive weeks of acceleration.

While the Omicron wave recorded, at its peak, four times more daily contaminations than at the height of the previous waves, the daily deaths remained much lower than their record of January 2021, when they had flirted with the 15,000.

Residents line up to buy oil under a sign giving advice on how to fight Covid-19, in Bandung, Indonesia on February 18, 2022 TIMUR MATAHARI AFP

The United States has the highest number of daily deaths in absolute value, 2,300 per day this week, ahead of Brazil (841) and Russia (726).

In proportion to the population, the two countries with the most deaths over the past week are Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina (9.0 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants), ahead of Croatia (8.5), Georgia (8.1) and North Macedonia (7.9).