LONDON (Reuters) – Reported daily coronavirus infections have been dropping worldwide for a month and on Tuesday reached their lowest level since mid-October, Reuters figures show, but health experts have warned against apathy, even with vaccines being launched worldwide.
Falls in infections and deaths coincide with severe blockades and restrictions on meetings and movements, while governments assess the need to stop the successive waves of the pandemic with the need to get people back to work and children back to school.
But optimism about a way out of the crisis has been tempered by new variants of the virus, raising fears about vaccine effectiveness.
“Now is not the time to let your guard down,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, technical leader of the World Health Organization at COVID-19, at a press conference in Geneva.
“… We cannot afford to enter a situation where we have cases increasing again.”
COVID-19 reached some countries much more strongly than others, although differences in the way infections are counted locally make it impossible to make a perfect comparison.
There were 351,335 new infections reported worldwide on Tuesday in an average of seven days, the number dropped from 863,737 on January 7. There were 17,649 deaths on January 26, dropping to 10,957 on February 16.
COVID-19 infections are decreasing in the United States, with 77,883 new infections reported on average each day. This represents 31% of the peak – the highest daily average reported on January 8.
There have been 27,902,387 infections and 490,795 coronavirus-related deaths reported in the United States since the beginning of the pandemic, the highest numbers in the world.
So far, 85 countries have started vaccinating people against the coronavirus and have administered at least 187,892,000 doses, according to Reuters figures.
Gibraltar, a British overseas territory located in the extreme south of Spain, is the world leader and has administered sufficient doses of vaccine to 40% of its population, assuming that each person needs two doses.
((Interactive graphic tracking of the global spread of coronavirus: open tmsnrt.rs/2FThSv7 in an external browser))
Reporting by Nick Macfie and Josephine Mason