Covid National Memorial Wall in London is a place of mourning for the families of the victims. Credit … Andrew Testa for The New York Times
The coronavirus continues to lurk around the world with an amazing clip, skipping a grim series of major stages of the 2022 pandemic: a total of 300 million known cases worldwide by early January, 400 million by early February and, by Tuesday, half a billion.
There have almost certainly been many more infections than the world’s 7.9 billion population, many of which remain undetected or unreported, and the reporting gap can only widen as some countries, including the United States, reduce official tests.
“This is dangerous,” Ali Moqdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington and a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a recent interview. “If you don’t test, then you don’t know what options you have.”
Regional officials at the World Health Organization recently called on African countries to step up testing and follow-up, and called on some countries in the United States to redouble their efforts to increase vaccination and testing, as Europe remains higher. (Britain, for example, has stopped free testing.) A WHO analysis also recently estimated that 65 percent of Africans were infected with the coronavirus by September 2021, nearly 100 times the number of confirmed cases on the continent.
The number of new cases reported worldwide every day has been declining for some time; the average last week was about 1.1 million cases a day, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. That’s about 32 percent less than two weeks ago.
But in the course of the pandemic, countries with limited public health resources may have detected and confirmed only a small proportion of the population. And more recent data may miss many results from rapid home tests that are never officially announced. Many people with infections do not get tested at all because they have no symptoms or do not have access to testing, or want to avoid the consequences of a positive test result, or choose not to do so for other reasons.
Coronavirus deaths are also declining. The world has reported an average of about 3,800 a day in the last week, down 23 percent from two weeks ago.
However, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adanom Gebrejesus recently said that the world remains in the acute phase of a pandemic and many health experts agree.
Experts’ warnings have not prevented many nations from almost completely abandoning their pandemic safeguards in the two months since the global number of cases exceeded 400 million. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines in late February, suggesting that most Americans may stop wearing masks and no longer need to maintain social distance or avoid crowded indoor spaces.
“What is happening worldwide and in the United States,” Dr. Mockad said, “is that people have largely given up. They just want to get back to normal. “
This desire is threatened by the rapid spread of the Omicron subvariant, known as BA.2, the most portable version of the virus identified so far. BA.2 now represents the vast majority of new cases in the United States and around the world; it spread even faster than BA.1, which helped fuel jumps in the winter.
The peak of the most recent jump may have passed in some parts of Europe, but Hong Kong is still trying to avoid the outbreak that began in January, and Shanghai residents are under blockade and report food shortages.
“The focus on the new cases is justified,” Crystal Watson, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said in a recent interview. “What we see in China is a very high jump in cases because they haven’t had much exposure there, and the vaccine is less effective there.
More than 5.1 billion people – about 66.4 percent of the world’s population – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the Our World in Data project at Oxford University. More than 1.7 billion booster injections or additional doses have been administered worldwide. But coverage varies considerably from region to region. Percentages in Africa are the lowest on any continent, with about 20 percent of people receiving at least one dose.
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