Weekly Covid-19 cases and deaths continue to decline globally: WHO

Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) legislators down a podium as they protest calling for the government to apologise for coronavirus deaths, at the Parliament in Taipei on Friday. Pic/AFP

The number of weekly Covid-19 cases and deaths continued to decline globally, the World Health Organisation has said, noting that both the case and death incidence have reduced for the past two months in the South-East Asian region.

The Covid-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update, released this week, said over 3.3 million new cases and over 55,000 new deaths were reported around the world during the week of September 20-26, 2021, a decrease of 10 per cent as compared to the previous week for both cases and deaths.

Globally, the numbers of weekly Covid-19 cases and deaths continued to decline, it said.

The largest decrease in new weekly cases was reported from the Eastern Mediterranean Region (17 per cent), followed by the Western Pacific Region (15 per cent), the Region of the Americas (14 per cent), the African Region (12 per cent) and the South-East Asia Region (10 per cent); while weekly cases in the European Region were similar to the previous week.

The number of new weekly deaths reported showed an over 15 per cent decline for all regions except for the European Region and the African Region. The largest decline in weekly deaths was reported from the Western Pacific Region, with a 24 per cent decline as compared to the previous week.

Globally, the cumulative number of confirmed Covid-19 cases now stand at over 231 million and the cumulative number of deaths is more than 4.7 million. Around the world, cases of the Alpha variant have been reported in 193 countries, territories or areas, while 142 countries have reported cases of the Beta variant and 96 countries have reported cases of the Gamma variant. The Delta variant has been reported in 187 countries, across all six WHO regions as of September 28.

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