The Covid-19 pandemic continued its retreat all over the world this week, however infections had been nonetheless raging in hotspots in Asia and Oceania, led by Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Right here is the state of play primarily based on AFP’s database:
The common variety of international every day instances dropped for the fifth week in a row, shrinking by 12 p.c to 1.47 million, in line with an AFP tally to Thursday.
Each day infections have fallen by half since peaking at 3.37 million in late January with the extremely contagious Omicron variant.
The confirmed instances solely mirror a fraction of the particular variety of infections, with various counting practices and ranges of testing in several nations.
Asia, Oceania buck enchancment
This week, Asia and Oceania bucked a worldwide enchancment, seeing the variety of instances spike by 25 p.c and 72 p.c respectively in comparison with the earlier week.
The scenario markedly improved in all different areas of the world, with 45 p.c much less instances within the Center East, 40 p.c much less within the Latin America-Caribbean zone, 34 p.c much less in Africa, 23 p.c much less within the US-Canada zone and 22 p.c much less in Europe.
New Zealand recorded the largest improve in new instances, with an nearly seven-fold spike (590 p.c).
Hong Kong was sizzling on its heels with 403 p.c extra instances. Then got here Vietnam with 119 p.c extra, South Korea 40 p.c extra and Thailand 19 p.c extra.
The primary drops got here in Central Asia and the Caucasus, led by Azerbaijan the place instances plummeted by 63 p.c. In neighboring Armenia, instances dropped by three fifths and by 52 p.c in Georgia. In Panama, the variety of instances dropped by 51 p.c and in Israel by half.
South Korea has most instances
South Korea overtook Germany to report probably the most new instances this week, with 170,300 per day, a rise of two fifths.
Germany, with 153,700, or 7 p.c much less instances, stood in second place.
Vietnam got here in third place with 120,600, a rise of 119 p.c.
On a per capita foundation, the place with probably the most new instances over the week was Hong Kong, with 3,555 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Latvia adopted, with 3,081 and New Zealand with 2,550.
The variety of Covid-linked deaths continued to fall, by 19% this week to 7,596 per day.
The US once more mourned probably the most deaths, with a mean of 1,644 per day, adopted by Russia with 776 and Brazil 455.
The nations reporting the very best loss of life charges in proportion to their inhabitants had been Hong Kong with 12.6 per 100,000 inhabitants, adopted by Latvia (6.6) and Georgia (6.3).
