LONDON (Reuters) – Reported daily coronavirus infections have been falling around the world for a month and hit their lowest level since mid-October on Tuesday, Reuters figures show, but health experts warned of apathy even as vaccines are rolled out worldwide.
Declines in infections and deaths coincide with lockdowns and severe restraining of meetings and movements, as governments weigh the need to stop successive waves of the pandemic against 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 the efficacy of vaccines.
“This is not the time to let your guard down,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical leader at COVID-19, told a briefing in Geneva.
“… We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we have fallen again.”
COVID-19 has hit some countries much harder than others, although differences in the way infections are counted locally make it impossible to make a perfect comparison between apples and apples.
On Tuesday, 351,335 new infections were reported on a seven-day average, from 863,737 on January 7. There were 17,649 deaths on January 26 and fell to 10,957 on February 16.
COVID-19 infections are on the decline in the United States, with an average of 77,883 new infections per day. That’s 31% of the peak – the highest daily average reported on Jan. 8.
Since the start of the pandemic, 27,902,387 infections and 490,795 deaths from coronavirus have been reported in the United States, the highest in the world.
So far, 85 countries have begun to vaccinate people against the coronavirus and have administered at least 187,892,000 doses, according to Reuters figures.
Gibraltar, a British overseas territory located on the southern tip of Spain, is a world leader and has given adequate doses of vaccine to 40% of the population, assuming everyone needs two doses.
((Interactive graphical tracking global spread of coronavirus: open tmsnrt.rs/2FThSv7 in an external browser))
Reporting by Nick Macfie and Josephine Mason