COVID-19

4 charts show current state of pandemic heading into 2022

A pedestrian wearing a protective face mask walks past a street-art mural by French street artist JBC, in tribute to health workers depicting a nurse wearing a protective face mask in reference to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on March 24, 2021 in Paris, France.

Chesnot | Getty Images

Nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, reported daily infections are rising again as the omicron variant spreads rapidly around the world, in countries ranging from the U.S. and the U.K. to South Africa and Australia.

The World Health Organization labeled omicron a variant of concern. While much remains unknown about it, the WHO warned that the variant is spreading “significantly faster” than the delta strain and could change the course of the pandemic.

Still, “2022 must be the end of the Covid-19 pandemic,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said Wednesday.  

Data on the pandemic — such as confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths — likely underestimates the actual situation owing to limited testing, frequency of reporting and quality of data collected.

But based on available data, here are four charts that show the state of the Covid pandemic as 2021 comes to an end.

Omicron is gaining dominance

The omicron variant has been found in around 100 countries, said the WHO. The agency added that the number of Covid cases involving omicron is doubling every 1.5 to three days.

Cases are up, but deaths are down

The omicron variant triggered a new wave of infections globally. In Africa, daily confirmed cases jumped from a seven-day moving average of around 3.14 per million people at the start of November to 26.67 per million on Tuesday, according to an analysis by online repository Our World in Data.

Over the same period, the U.K.’s daily confirmed cases rose from a seven-day moving average of 603.38 per million people to around 1,280 per million people — a record high since the pandemic began, the analysis showed.

Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiology professor at The University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, said omicron seems to cause “about the same severity” as delta and other variants.  

“But if you’ve been vaccinated, if you’ve had an infection before, you’ve got some protection particularly against severe disease. And that means that omicron in reality looks milder,” Cowling told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.

“It looks like a milder infection because of the immunity that we’ve built up, not because the virus is particularly different in terms of its natural innate severity,” he added.

Vaccine inequality

The threat of omicron — and future variants — has highlighted the importance of vaccination in preventing severe disease, said experts. But the distribution of Covid vaccines has remained unequal.

“We need to use the vaccines as best we can, we need to use boosters if those are indicated,” Kim told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” earlier this month.  

“And then we need to use other methods including masks, distance and avoiding crowds and hygiene in order to reduce the total infection burden within a country.”

WHO’s Tedros said that to end the pandemic in the coming year, every country must vaccinate 70% of its population by the middle of 2022.

Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *