In its latest weekly pandemic report, the UN health service said the number of new coronavirus cases had dropped everywhere, including in the WHO’s West Pacific region, where it had been rising since December.
About 10 million new COVID-19 infections and more than 45,000 deaths were reported worldwide last week, following a 23% drop in deaths last week.
The jump in reported deaths, from 33,000 last week, was mainly due to a change in accounting. The WHO noted that countries such as Chile and the United States have changed the way they define COVID-19 deaths.
In addition, more than 4,000 deaths from the state of Maharashtra in India that were not originally included in the number of COVID-19 deaths were added last week, according to the WHO.
The WHO has repeatedly said that the number of COVID-19 cases is probably a huge underestimation of the prevalence of coronavirus. The agency has warned countries in recent weeks not to stop comprehensive tests and other surveillance measures, saying such efforts would cripple efforts to closely monitor the spread of the virus.
“The data is gradually becoming less representative, less relevant and less powerful,” the WHO said. “This hinders our collective ability to monitor where the virus is located, how it is spreading and how it is evolving: information and analysis that remains critical to effectively ending the acute phase of the pandemic.”
The agency warned that less surveillance would be particularly damaging to efforts to identify new variants of COVID-19 and undermine a possible backlash.
Many countries across Europe, North America and elsewhere have recently abolished almost all of their COVID-19 protocols, relying on high vaccination levels to prevent a new outbreak of infection, even when the most infectious BA.2 omicron subtype causes increase in new cases.
The British authorities said that while they expect to see more cases, they have not seen an equivalent increase in hospitalizations and deaths.
Despite the global decline in reported cases, China locked Shanghai this week to try to curb the outbreak of the small virus that has caused the largest wave of disease in the country since the virus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019. .
U.S. officials expanded the use of booster vaccines on Tuesday as regulators said Americans aged 50 and over could receive a second booster at least four months after their last vaccination.
An AP-NORC poll, meanwhile, found that less than half of Americans now wear face masks regularly, avoid crowds and skip unnecessary travel.
