“I think when you’re sitting in Europe, you feel like you just had the epidemic and everyone’s coming out of it. It feels like it’s over with. But it’s actually just at the start in every country in some ways,” says Azra Ghani at Imperial College London of covid-19’s spread.
Her view is backed up by World Health Organization statistics, which show that the world experienced its highest daily jump in new confirmed coronavirus cases on 7 June, a record that has since been broken three more times. “Although the situation in Europe is improving, globally it is worsening,” said WHO general secretary Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press conference on 8 June.
The virus’s spread continues as the world rapidly approaches the grim threshold of half a million confirmed deaths, with 433,000 reported as of 15 June. The milestone of 8 million confirmed cases will probably be passed in the next 24 hours.
The geographical burden of covid-19 is shifting. While the US is still worst affected, with more than 2 million cases and more than 100,000 deaths, it is now followed by Brazil, Russia and India, followed mostly by European countries. Peru has the eighth most cases, and the WHO has called South America the new epicentre of the epidemic. The Middle East’s share of global new cases has climbed too in the past fortnight. Cases in Africa are still relatively low, but are speeding up: reaching 100,000 took 98 days, but 200,000 just 18 days.
Worldwide, the average number of daily new confirmed cases in June has settled at a higher level than in May. However, David Heymann at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says deaths, rather than cases, are the gold standard for measuring transmission, despite reflecting events around two to four weeks ago. Unlike cases, global daily deaths are relatively static, averaging 4295 in June so far, versus 4619 in May."
From New Scientist
