Rajeev Choudhury

Amid the continuing trend of declining numbers of new infections of the COVID19 cases across the world, South Korea registered the most numbers of new cases for the week ending April 17, 2022, data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) reveal.

In its weekly epidemiological update released on April 20, 2022, the UN health agency said that over five million new cases and over 18,000 deaths were reported across the globe during the week.

This is a fall of 24% and 12% over the numbers of the preceding week, the WHO said.

Among the countries, South Korea reported the most number of new weekly cases, followed by France, Germany, Italy and France.

Of these, only Japan registered a marginal rise of 1% in the number of new weekly cases, while for the rest of the countries the declining trend continued, data released by the WHO shows.

The United States reported the most number of new weekly deaths with 3076 people succumbing to the disease during the week, which was nine per cent less than the number reported the preceding week.

However, these data should be interpreted with caution as several countries are progressively changing their COVID-19 testing strategies, resulting in lower overall numbers of tests performed and consequently lower numbers of cases detected, the WHO said.

The data from genomic surveillance revealed that the Omicron variant remains the dominant variant circulating globally, accounting for nearly all sequences recently reported to GISAID, the health agency said.

Among the 313,715 sequences uploaded to GISAID with specimens collected in the last 30 days, 312,033 (99.5%) were Omicron, 136 (<0.1%) were Delta and 1,393 (0.4%) sequences were not assigned to a Pango lineage, WHO said.