Archives: Situation Reports

The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 22 February 2022

by Mike Evans

“Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance” 

Abigail Adams

Across the world in the past week there has been a 21% decline in Covid 19 cases reported and an 11% drop in deaths. This has prompted many countries to look at reducing their restrictions they had in place. In this report we are looking at what changes have happened or are about to happen across Europe and the World.

After evaluating that the COVID-19 restrictions have not halted the further spread of the virus and its variants, as well as after taking into account the increased vaccination rates, several European Union/Schengen Area countries have announced that they will now apply less stringent rules.

Some of the countries that have removed testing requirements and that will apply relaxed rules are Sweden, Norway, Greece, and Czechia, among others,

Sweden is among the first countries to announce that it would no longer apply entry rules to incoming travellers. The Swedish authorities announced that starting from February 9, travellers from the EU/Schengen Area will be able to enter the country restriction-free, regardless of their vaccination or recovery status. Such a decision, which was announced by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice, means that travellers from the EU/Schengen Area are no longer required to present an EU Digital COVID Certificate or other proof of vaccination, recovery, or negative test results when reaching Sweden.

Apart from easing the entry rules for travellers, Sweden has announced that from February 9, the majority of national COVID-19 restrictions will be lifted too. On the other hand, rules that are currently imposed against third countries will continue to remain in place.

Also in Scandinavia, Norway has also eased its entry rules. The Norwegian authorities announced earlier in January that the quarantine requirement would be removed as this measure “is no longer considered necessary for infection control.”

Travellers can now enter Norway without being subject to self-isolation rules even if they have not been vaccinated or recovered from the virus.

Nonetheless, it has been emphasised that unvaccinated and unrecovered travellers still need to get tested and complete the entry form before their arrival in Norway.

Meanwhile in Greece, the government of Greece has only abolished its COVID-19 testing requirement for travellers who hold a valid EU COVID Certificate.

The decision was announced by the Greek government and means that all those who hold one of the certificates recognised in Greece are no longer required to undergo pre-entry testing. On the other hand, travellers who do not meet the entry criteria will continue to be subject to the testing requirement, even if they have been vaccinated or recovered from the virus.

Czechia has also eased rules for travellers as well as for the citizens of the country. The Prime Minister of Czechia, Petr Fiala, stated that starting from February 9 the requirement to present one of the passes would be dropped. This means that all persons are now able to enter restaurants, bars, cultural events, and other facilities without having to present a valid or vaccination certificate. As for the remaining restrictions, Czechia plans on removing them during the second half of this month.

While other countries were still evaluating the COVID-19 situation, Denmark lifted all its COVID-19 restrictions earlier this month, thus becoming the first country to do so. In line with the new rules that Denmark has, travellers are no longer required to wear a mask or present one of the certificates that fall under the COVID-19 Certificates in order to enter restaurants, bars, and other indoor venues. Additionally, the quarantine requirement for persons who have tested positive for the virus has also been abolished.

Across the Atlantic in Canada, another weekend of protests Canada’s Covid-19 mandates saw around 200 arrests in the nation’s capital as authorities moved to end the week- long demonstration, towing vehicles and going after protesters’ pocketbooks with financial penalties. Police said they employed pepper spray and escalated tactics over the weekend to disperse crowds and make arrests with protesters gathered in front of the Parliament building. Some of those arrests included protesters who allegedly had smoke grenades and fireworks, and were wearing body armour, police said.

The Ottawa protest started in late January by a group of truck drivers opposed to a Covid-19 vaccine and testing mandate. But others outside the trucking industry have joined to express their frustration with an array of other Covid-19 health measures, such as requirements to wear masks in schools.

Meanwhile As COVID-19 cases decline, the Government of Canada is easing some of its more restrictive travel requirements. Changes to the federal government’s COVID-19 testing requirements for all fully vaccinated travellers take effect on February 28, 2022

Fully vaccinated travellers arriving to Canada will now have the option of using a quicker and cheaper COVID-19 rapid antigen test to meet pre-arrival testing requirements. Fully vaccinated travellers may still use a molecular test result (“PCR”) but it is no longer mandatory. Fully vaccinated travellers may still be randomly selected for post-arrival testing but will not have to quarantine while awaiting their test result. More restrictive rules still apply to all unvaccinated travellers.

In addition to these pre-arrival and post-arrival testing changes, international flights will be allowed to land at all Canadian airports as of February 28, 2022. This will return further normalcy to air travel. Travellers who are not fully vaccinated will still be subject to more restrictive travel rules.  Unvaccinated travellers are still unable to board a flight departing from a Canadian airport and   will also have issues with boarding return flights to Canada. Unvaccinated travellers are also required to take a PCR pre-arrival test. Foreign nationals who are unvaccinated are not eligible to board a flight to Canada. Any unvaccinated traveller who manages to arrive at a Canadian port of entry will be required to quarantine for 14 days and take post-arrival testing.

Across the other side of the world, Australia saw its first international tourists arrive this week since they closed their borders to all international travellers in March 2020.

International tourists and business travellers began arriving in Australia with few restrictions on Monday, bringing together families in tearful reunions after separations of two years or longer forced by some of the strictest pandemic measures of any democracy in the world.

Australia closed its borders to tourists in March 2020 in a bid to reduce the local spread of COVID-19, but on Monday removed its final travel restrictions for fully vaccinated passengers.

Travellers were greeted at Sydney’s airport by jubilant well-wishers waving toy koalas and favourite Australian foods including Tim Tams chocolate cookies and jars of Vegemite spread.

Federal Tourism Minister Dan Tehan was on hand to welcome the first arrivals on a Qantas flight from Los Angeles which landed at 6:20 a.m. local time. “I think there’ll be a very strong rebound in our tourism market. Our wonderful experiences haven’t gone away,” Tehan said.

Danielle Vogl, who lives in Canberra, and her Florida-based partner Eric Lochner have been separated since October 2019 by the travel restrictions. She said she burst into tears when she heard about the lifting of the restrictions, which will allow them to reunite in April, and telephoned him with the news.

“I actually woke him up to tell him, because I thought it was big enough news to do that,” Vogl told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“He couldn’t believe it. He was like ‘Are you sure, is this true?’ and I’m like ‘Yes, it’s happening. This is over now: we can be together again,”‘ she added.

Lochner was not eligible for an exemption from the travel ban because the couple weren’t married or living together. “It’s been a very long and very cruel process for us,” Vogl said.

Qantas on Monday was bringing in passengers from eight overseas destinations including Vancouver, Singapore, London, and New Delhi. The Sydney-based airline’s chief executive Alan Joyce said bookings have been strong since the federal government announced two weeks ago that the country was relaxing restrictions.

“It has been a tough two years for everybody in the tourism industry, but today is really one of the big steps on the way back to a full recovery so we are very excited,” Joyce said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said 1.2 million people had visas to enter Australia with 56 international flights due to touch down in the first 24 hours of the border reopening.

Whilst the border is now open there are still very stringent rules surrounding the pandemic and the individual states have their own rules so it is imperative people check before they arrive as to what they will need to do.

Finally, to show balance and that the pandemic is still not over everywhere we turn to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is now dealing with a bigger Covid crisis than the outbreak in Wuhan that heralded the start of the pandemic, throwing into doubt whether China’s Covid Zero playbook of mass testing, isolation and quarantine can stamp it out.

Daily cases in the city have surged to more than 6,000 from a little over 100 in less than a month, topping anything seen in China’s initial wave centred around Wuhan save for Feb. 12, 2020, when a backlog of reporting saw daily cases spike above 15,000. That, and subsequent outbreaks in China, were brought under control by lockdowns that Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said are off the table.  Instead, authorities are planning to test each of the city’s 7.5 million residents while turning hotels into isolation centres. However, the testing blitz won’t start until next month, raising concerns the virus will run rampant in the meantime, further straining an already overwhelmed health system.

“Lining up and gathering for testing presents a huge infection risk,” said Jin Dong-Yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. “If the case load reaches tens of thousands as predicted, mass testing will only make things go from bad to worse. What you need to do is to avoid contact as much as possible.”

The thousands of daily infections means the opportunity to deploy mainland China’s strategy of mass testing to disrupt transmission has already been lost, Jin said.“In China they are only able to do this because infections are so low so they can shoot mosquitoes with cannon balls.” he said, referring to the outsized responsemainland authorities mount at the detection of just a handful of cases.

While more is now known about the virus and how to treat it than when it first appeared in Wuhan, Hong Kong is also dealing with the more-infectious omicron variant. And while more than 10 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, about 40% of Hong Kong residents aged 80 or above have received a first dose, leaving them particularly vulnerable.

Until the next time Stay Safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 425,571,831

Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,908,887

Total Recovered Worldwide – 351,377,953

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 68,284,991 (16% of the total cases)

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 357,286,840

Information and Resources:  

https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-18

The Overseas Situation Report Friday 18 February 2022

by Mike Evans

 “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” 

Marie Curie

In the week when we saw the number of cases worldwide drop by over 20% compared to last week and the reported number of deaths due to covid 19 dropping by 7% the question many people are asking is – Are we seeing the end of Covid 19?

In this report we are looking at what the current thinking is regarding the end game of the pandemic.

In the midst of a vast wave of milder infections, countries around the world are dialling back restrictions and softening their messaging. Many people are starting to assume they’ve had their run-in with Covid-19 and that the pandemic is tailing off. As a virus-weary world limps through the third year of the outbreak, experts are sending out a warning signal: Don’t expect omicron to be the last variant we have to contend with – and don’t let your guard down yet.

However, that may not be the case. The crisis isn’t over until it’s over everywhere. The effects will continue to reverberate through wealthier nations – disrupting supply chains, travel plans and health care – as the coronavirus largely dogs under-vaccinated developing countries over the coming months.

Before any of that, the world has to get past the current wave. Omicron may appear to cause less severe disease than previous strains, but it is wildly infectious, pushing new case counts to once unimaginable records. Meanwhile, evidence is emerging that the variant may not be as innocuous as early data suggest.

There’s also no guarantee that the next mutation – and there will be more – won’t be an offshoot of a more dangerous variant such as Delta. And your risk of catching Covid more than once is real. “The virus keeps raising that bar for us every few months,” said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine. “When we were celebrating the amazing effectiveness of booster shots against the delta variant, the bar was already being raised by Omicron. “It seems like we are constantly trying to catch up with the virus,” she said.

“There is a lot of happy talk that goes along the lines that Omicron is a mild virus and it’s effectively functioning as an attenuated live vaccine that’s going to create massive herd immunity across the globe. “That’s flawed for a number of reasons.” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “With Omicron, because it has more of an upper respiratory component, it’s even less likely to result in durable immunity than previous variants,” Hotez said. “On that basis, it’s incorrect to believe that this is somehow going to be the end of the pandemic.”

Experts now believe that the virus will never go away entirely, and instead will continue to evolve to create new waves of infection. Mutations are possible every time the pathogen replicates, so surging caseloads put everyone in danger. The sheer size of the current outbreak means more hospitalizations, deaths and virus mutations are all but inevitable. Many people who are infected aren’t making it into the official statistics, either because a home test result isn’t formally recorded or because the infected person never gets tested at all.

In the USA it is estimated that only about 20 to 25% of all cases are reported according to Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle. With daily cases peaking at an average of more than 800,000 in mid-January, the number of underlying infections may have exceeded 3 million a day – or nearly 1% of the U.S. population, Bedford estimates. Since it takes five to 10 days to recover, as much as 10% of people in the country may have been infected at any one time.

He’s not alone in projecting astronomical numbers. At the current infection rate, computer modelling indicates more than half of Europe will have contracted omicron by mid-March, according to Hans Kluge, a regional director for the World Health Organisation.

Meanwhile, a sub-variant known as BA.2 is spreading rapidly in South Africa. It appears to be even more transmissible than the original strain and may cause a second surge in the current wave, one of the country’s top scientists said.

And just because you’ve already had the virus doesn’t mean you won’t get re-infected, as Covid doesn’t confer lasting immunity.

New evidence suggests that Delta infections didn’t help avert omicron, even in vaccinated people. That would explain why places like the U.K. and South Africa experienced such significant outbreaks even after being decimated by Delta. Reinfection is also substantially more common with Omicron than previous variants.

It’s sobering for a world that’s been trying to move on from the virus with a new intensity in recent months. But the outlook isn’t all gloom. Antiviral medicines are hitting the market, vaccines are more readily available and tests that can be self-administered in minutes are now easy and cheap to obtain in many places.

In six months’ time, many richer countries will have made the transition from pandemic to endemic. But that doesn’t mean masks will be a thing of the past. We’ll need to grapple with our approach to booster shots, as well as the pandemic’s economic and political scars. There’s also the shadow of long Covid.

“As long as there are areas of the world where the virus could be evolving, and new mutants arriving, we all will be susceptible to these new variants,” said Glenda Gray, chief executive officer of the South African Medical Research Council.

Lockdowns and travel curbs aren’t going away, even if they are becoming less restrictive on the whole.

“The things that will matter there are whether we are able to respond when there is a local surge,” said Mark McClellan, former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and director of the Duke-Margolis Centre for Health Policy. “Maybe going back to putting on more masks or being a little bit more cautious about distancing.”

Inoculation is still the world’s primary line of defence against Covid. More than 62% of people around the globe have gotten at least one dose, with overall rates in wealthy countries vastly higher than in developing ones. At the current pace, it will take another five months until 75% of the world’s population has received their first shot.

But studies show one or two injections don’t ward off the pathogen. The best bet at this point is a booster shot, which triggers the production of neutralising antibodies and a deeper immune response.

People inoculated with more traditional inactivated vaccines, such as the widely used shots from China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd., will need at least two boosters – preferably with different vaccines – to control the virus, Yale’s Iwasaki said.

In the next six months, more countries will contend with whether to roll out a fourth shot. Israel has started and the U.S. backs them for vulnerable people, but India is pushing back and refusing to “blindly follow” other countries.

While the virus won’t be overwhelming hospitals and triggering restrictions forever, it’s still unclear when – or how – it will become safe to leave on the back burner. Experts agree that in developed countries including the U.S. and much of Europe, the virus could be well in hand by mid-2022. There will be better access to pills such as Pfizer Inc.’s Paxlovid, rapid antigen tests will be more readily available, and people will have become accustomed to the idea that Covid is here to stay. Vaccinations and new treatments, widespread testing, and immunity as a result of previous infections are helping. Countries like Denmark are getting rid of all pandemic restrictions despite ongoing outbreaks.

Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic will be far from over.

The threat of new variants is highest in less wealthy countries, particularly those where immune conditions are more common. The delta mutation was first identified in India while omicron emerged in southern Africa, apparently during a chronic Covid infection in an immunocompromised HIV patient.

“As long as we refuse to vaccinate the world, we will continue to see new waves,” Hotez said. “We are going to continue to have pretty dangerous variants coming out of low- and middle-income countries. That’s where the battleground is.”

Let’s all hope that the vaccine programme around the world can help to stop the pandemic as soon as possible. Until the next time Stay Safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 418,657,700

Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,871,228

Total Recovered Worldwide – 342,122,557

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 70,663,915 (16.9% of the total cases)

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 347,993,785

Information and Resources:  

https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/coronavirus-omicron-may-not-be-last-variant-dont-drop-guard-yet-warn-scientists-2767171

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries

The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 15 February 2022

by Mike Evans

“There’s no place like home”

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

Since the pandemic first started, the world has had to rely on shipping to get goods and services delivered to all parts of the globe. These ships loaded with cargo are a vital part of keeping the majority of the world stocked up. The people who crew these ships have since the start of the pandemic been largely forgotten as an essential part of the supply chain and for some it has meant spending months on end onboard a ship without the chance to get off in ports around the world due to the fact that for many of them the opportunity to be vaccinated has not been given.

In this report we are relaying a couple of stories about this vital part of the world’s economic survival and what is being done to help the seaman.

Inside the gates of Victoria’s Port of Portland in Australia, out of public view, unfolds the plight of the international seamen who work aboard cargo ships importing and exporting goods around the world.

For the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, seafarers haven’t been allowed off their ships any further than this long, empty gangway. The Ocean Jubilee has been loading wheat grain from Victoria’s west for the past nine days.

But its crew of 20 haven’t set foot in the town or even in the port’s Mission to Seafarers centre, a special respite room for international seamen.

Kevin Hernando and his crew are Filipino and have been away from their families for seven months. “When you stay on board a long, long time, your mind becomes lonely,” he said. “You feel homeless, homesick.” During the months at sea, what the crew say they most look forward to is disembarking from the ship in each new port, to see the sights, buy a phone card to call home, and refresh their minds.

“Before, [when there was] no pandemic, you will go visit a seaman centre like that [Portland’s Mission to Seafarers], you will go sightseeing, shopping,” Mr Hernando said.

But for two years, the seafarers’ only link to Portland’s comforts has been via one man: Neville Manson. He runs the Mission to Seafarers centre inside the Port of Portland, just 100 metres from the gangway.

It temporarily shut at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and has been closed since. “Seafarers haven’t been able to come to the centre … haven’t been able to leave their ship,” Mr Manson said. “The Port of Portland and the government have given us access to the ship’s gangway so we can deliver items to the ship,” he said.Mr Manson has been accepting orders from crews for fresh groceries, treats and items like phone cards.

He often makes several trips a day buying and delivering items and is showered in thanks from the men who would otherwise have no way of accessing these prized goods.

Port of Portland chief executive Greg Tremewen said the port conducted a six-month study of ships arriving at the city in 2021 and found that most ships had been out at sea for an average of 17 days.

After two years of their prohibited movement, Mr Manson is advocating for the international seafarers to be allowed an hour or two of recreation in his centre. “In Victoria, the vaccination rate is over 90 per cent. We want to see the same for seafarers,” he said. “If seafarers were vaccinated, then they should be able to leave their vessels again, that’s what we’re looking for.” Mr Manson is also advocating for seafarers to have access to vaccines.

He said he had emailed Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Minister for Ports but received no reply. “These guys [the seafarers] are really low risk. They’ve been on the ship. They haven’t been anywhere,” Mr Manson said. “I’ve sent off letters to government ministers, to DHHS, and those have not had a reply at all, which is really frustrating.”

Mr Manson said some of the seafarers he met were desperate for a COVID-19 vaccine, telling him that supplies in their country of origin were low and they had no way to access protection.

“They know they’re not going to be able to come off unless they’re double-vaxxed and we wouldn’t expect them to come off unless they were double-vaxxed, as well,” he said. “But they’re more worried about getting COVID from us than we are from them. And they want to be vaccinated so that they can come ashore.”

Filipino seaman Kevin Hernando said while most of his crew were vaccinated, four of them missed out due to restricted supplies in the Philippines. “Supply is locked, there is a lack of suppliers,” he said. “We hope that when we go back [to Portland] again, we can go ashore, very much,” Mr Hernando said.

The DHHS declined to comment, saying it was a matter for the Department of Transport. Meanwhile the seamen continue to be locked out of the port.

The pandemic caused chaos within global shipping and crew members from some of the poorest nations paid a high price.

Among the hundreds of thousands of seafarers left stranded by Covid-19, perhaps none have faced an ordeal as extreme as that of the i-Kiribatis.

Finally at the end of December 2021, after a year-long odyssey across continents – shuttled between foreign nations and locked out of their homeland as waves of coronavirus closed previously safe routes – that ordeal finally came to an end.

In a palm-fringed courtyard in Tarawa, the capital of the small Pacific Island nation of Kiribati, tears and shouts of joy greeted 141 seafarers during an emotional reunion with families they had not seen for almost two years.

Temware Iotebwa, 39, said that at first, he did not spot his children – his son, Tawati, 15, and daughters Sherlene, 11, Eilene, 6, and three-year-old AyMe – in the crowd. But their shouts quickly drew tears to his eyes.

“When my younger kids first saw me, they were shouting and calling my name,” says Iotebwa, who last saw his children in February 2020. “Hearing their voices and seeing their faces brought tears of joy to my eyes. That Sunday was one of my happiest days. We laughed and we cried, and I got a lot of hugs.”

Iotebwa, an able seaman, had worked a month of a nine-month contract on the Hamburg Süd/Maersk container ship MV Monte Pascoal, when the pandemic was declared. He disembarked in Belgium, before being flown to Fiji.

He and his crewmates have spent the past nine months in limbo, sharing cramped hotel rooms and unable to tell their families when they would see them again.

Of the estimated 1.7 million seafarers worldwide, more than half are from developing countries such as Kiribati, a low-lying nation of 33 islands with one of the lowest standards of living in Oceania and a poor healthcare system. Concerned that it might not be able to cope, Kiribati responded to the pandemic in 2020 by closing its borders. The strategy successfully kept Covid cases at zero.

But for Iotebwa and his fellow i-Kiribati seafarers, it meant a year of hell, caught in the middle of protracted negotiations between the shipping companies, the International Chamber of Shipping, and a Kiribati government fearful of the risks of allowing the return of seafarers who may have been exposed to Covid.

Finally, in April 2021, after months of talks, the Kiribati government agreed to repatriate the seafarers, who would first be quarantined in Fiji. But then Fiji saw a sudden spike in coronavirus cases and the Kiribati government reversed its policy. After allowing about 60 seafarers back into the country, the authorities closed the border again, with no exceptions.

Iotebwa had just been told he was about to be flying home when it happened. It was his lowest moment, he says. “My excitement turned to hopelessness when I heard the news,” he says over a video link from Tarawa. “The waiting time turned from days to months. My kids missed me very much and I missed them.” His family were worried too; the Grand Melanesian Hotel in the Fijian town of Nadi, paid for by the shipping company, was overcrowded and uncomfortable with no privacy.

“It felt like a prison,” he says. “My wife, Takentemwanoku Matiota Iotebwa, constantly reminded me to be careful and to stay away from people to avoid getting infected. She was very worried. “They kept their spirits up by playing games of croquet and tug-of-war in the lobby.

He is happy now he is back at home, but there is sadness, too. One of his friends lost his father, another his wife. Marriages broke up under the strain of waiting and the ordeal has taken a financial toll on the families. The seafarers are often their families’ main breadwinners and a source of remittances. They stopped being paid in early 2021, and now worry about their employment prospects with borders remaining closed.

“I don’t blame anyone because this pandemic can happen anytime and anywhere,” says Iotebwa. “But if my government was smart, it could have found other ways to bring us seafarers home sooner. Other poorer countries arranged their seafarers’ return immediately while still on lockdown.”

As we start to see the end of the pandemic, we should all remember that there are many people around the world who are doing very important jobs to keep the economies of the world running who perhaps are forgotten by many when we tend to think about ourselves and how our own lives have been impacted by the pandemic.

Until the next time stay safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 412,840,763

Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,836,943

Total Recovered Worldwide – 333,451,445

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 73,552,375 (17.8% of the total cases)

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 339,288,388

Information and Resources:  

https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-14

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/

The Overseas Situation Report Friday 11 February 2022

by Mike Evans

“No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow”

Maya Angelou

This week saw a number of new milestones in the long fight against Covid 19. On Wednesday the number of reported cases around the world reached 400 million. In the USA the death toll reached 900,000 and in France the number of reported cases since the start of the pandemic reached 20 million.

Global COVID-19 cases surpassed 400 million on Wednesday, as the highly contagious Omicron variant dominates the outbreak, pushing health systems in several countries to the brink of capacity.

The Omicron variant, which is dominating the surge around the world, accounts for almost all new cases reported daily. While cases have begun to level off in many countries, more than 2 million cases are still being reported on average each day. Deaths, which tend to lag cases, have increased by 70% in the last five weeks based on the seven-day average.

While preliminary evidence from several countries have shown that Omicron is milder than previous variants, a large volume of cases can potentially overburden healthcare systems globally.

It took over a month for COVID cases to reach 400 million from 300 million, compared to five months for the cases to reach 300 million from 200 million. The pandemic has killed over 6 million people worldwide.

The top five countries reporting the most cases on a seven-day average – United States, France, Germany, Russia, and Brazil – account for roughly 37% of all new cases reported worldwide. The United States leads the world in the most cases reported each day, with a million new cases reported in the country every three days. Cases and hospitalizations in the country are slowing down from its peak in January this year. On Friday, the country surpassed 900,000 deaths related to COVID.

In France, the seven-day average of new infections has held at over 210,000 per day, adding about a million new cases every five days. The cumulative total for confirmed COVID cases in France since the start of the pandemic passed 20 million this week.

About half of all new infections reported worldwide were from countries in Europe, with 21 countries still at the peak of their infection curve. The region has reported over 131 million cases and over 2 million deaths related to COVID since the pandemic began. Despite Europe reporting a million new cases almost every day, some countries are gradually lifting restrictions as the outbreak eases locally. Spain has scrapped a requirement for people to wear masks outdoors, extending a wider rollback of restrictions as the contagion slowly recedes in the country. On Monday, Greece started allowing tourists with a European vaccination certificate to enter the country without having to show a negative test for COVID.

Last Friday, India’s death toll from COVID-19 crossed 500,000, a level many health experts say was breached last year but obscured by inaccurate surveys and unaccounted deaths. An estimated 3 million people have died from COVID-19 in the south-Asian nation until mid-2021, according to one study published in the journal Science that relied on three different databases.

Roughly 62% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, while only 11% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, according to figures from Our World in Data.

Let’s look at some of these stories in more detail. The coronavirus pandemic reached a grim new milestone in the United States on Friday with the nation’s cumulative death toll from COVID-19 surpassing 900,000, even as the daily number of lives lost has begun to level off. The latest tally marks an increase of more than 100,000 U.S. COVID-19 fatalities since Dec. 12, coinciding with a surge of infections and hospitalizations driven by the highly contagious Omicron variant of the virus.

Preliminary evidence has shown that Omicron, while far more infectious, generally causes less severe illness than earlier iterations of the virus, such as Delta. But the sheer volume of Omicron cases fuelled a surge in hospitalizations that has strained many U.S. healthcare systems to their limits in recent weeks.

Experts have said the bulk of Omicron patients requiring hospitalisation were unvaccinated individuals and people with other underlying chronic health conditions. Data also suggests that Omicron may have hit the United States harder than other countries with younger overall populations, such as in Africa.

U.S. President Joe Biden, whose first year in office has been dogged by a pandemic that has proven more implacable than was expected – due in part to many Americans’ hesitancy to get vaccinated – used this significant milestone to urge greater vaccine uptake.

Some 250 million Americans have received at least one shot, “and we have saved more than one million American lives as a result,” he said in a statement.

The latest tally stands as the highest number of COVID-19 deaths reported by any nation, followed by Russia, Brazil, and India with more than 1.8 million deaths combined. In terms of coronavirus fatalities per capita, the United States ranks 20th, well below the top two – Peru and Russia.

Nevertheless, the U.S. COVID-19 death rate appears to be slowing as the Omicron surge wanes. The seven-day average fell for two days in a row to 2,592, compared with a peak average of 2,674 in the current wave of infections. By comparison, the peak during the Delta wave in January 2021 was an average of 3,300 deaths a day.

Nationally, confirmed COVID-19 cases are now averaging 354,000 a day, half of what was reported less than two weeks ago and down from the peak of nearly 806,000 infections a day on Jan. 15. Many infections, however, go uncounted because they are detected by home-testing kits and not reported to public health authorities.

In France where the cumulative total of reported cases reached 20 million this week. Since mid-January the country has seen a rise of over 6 million cases, the seven-day average of new infections has held at over 300,000 per day, adding about a million new cases every three days.

Health Minister Olivier Veran said earlier this week that the current wave seems to have peaked. He also said that a confirmed infection was equivalent to a COVID vaccine injection, provided that one has had at least one COVID shot. Some 54 million of France’s more than 67 million citizens have now received at least one vaccination shot.

The ministry does not detail how many cases of double or triple infection might be included in its tally of cases.

Despite Europe reporting a million new cases almost every day, some countries are gradually lifting restrictions as the outbreak eases locally. Spain has scrapped a requirement for people to wear masks outdoors, extending a wider rollback of restrictions as the contagion slowly recedes in the country. On Monday, Greece started allowing tourists with a European vaccination certificate to enter the country without having to show a negative test for COVID.

The Swedish government at an extraordinary meeting on Monday decided to remove all entry restrictions from the Nordic countries and other EU/EEA countries on February 9th, the same day it also scrapped nearly all its domestic Covid rules and recommendations. “The decision follows an assessment by the Public Health Agency of Sweden that the entry restrictions are no longer a proportionate infection control measure,” read a government statement. The lifting of the entry restrictions is a great relief for many travellers, not least for those living and working in the Nordic border regions.

Today’s decision also reduces the burden on the Swedish Police Authority, which no longer need to set aside staff to check Covid-19 certificates at the border.  It said the current entry restrictions for non-EU/EEA countries would however remain in place for now, “in accordance with EU recommendations regarding entry from third countries”.

This means that people travelling to Sweden from these countries will still not be able enter the country directly unless they are covered by one of a series of exemptions from the entry ban. The entry ban on non-EU/EEA arrivals is currently in force until March 31st. A Health Ministry spokesperson reported last week that the entry restrictions would first be removed for the Nordic countries (although as of Monday’s decision it has been extended to the rest of the EU and EEA) as a “first step” and that more information would come. “The government is continuously reviewing the entry restrictions introduced due to the pandemic. It is important that the restrictions do not go beyond what is justified,” the spokesperson said at the time.

Finally in Asia, India’s official COVID-19 death toll crossed 500,000 on Friday, a level some data analysts said was breached last year but was obscured by inaccurate surveys and unaccounted dead in the hinterlands, where millions remain vulnerable to the disease.

The country, which has the fourth-highest tally of deaths globally, recorded 400,000 deaths by July 2021 after the devastating outbreak from the Delta variant of the coronavirus, according to official data. Some believe the figures were much higher. “Our study published in the journal Science estimates 3 million COVID deaths in India until mid-2021 using three different databases,” Chinmay Tumbe, an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, who co-authored the study,

Last month, the Indian government dismissed the study as baseless in a notification saying there is a robust system of birth and death reporting. India’s states record deaths from COVID after collating data from their districts. In the last few months, several states have updated the number of deaths, some under pressure from the country’s top court. In most instances, authorities said there were lapses due to delayed registrations and other administrative errors.

India is currently in the midst of a third wave of the coronavirus led by the Omicron variant, which some top experts say is already in community transmission although federal officials say most cases are mild. Last month, the government eased testing norms and told states to drop mandatory testing for contacts of confirmed cases unless they were old or battling other conditions. But, with the number of tests falling, the government issued a revised circular warning states they would miss the spread of the virus.

According to official figures, India’s overall number of COVID infections has reached 41.95 million, the second highest globally behind the United States.

To prevent new surges, the government has vaccinated three-fourths of the eligible 939 million adult population with the mandatory two-dose regime.

India’s cumulative tally of 500,055 deaths on Friday included 1,072 fatalities reported over the last 24 hours, according to the federal health ministry. Out of this, 335 deaths were reported from the southern state of Kerala that has, for weeks, been updating data with deaths from last year.

Kerala, with less than 3% of India’s 1.35 billion population, accounts for nearly 11% of the total deaths reported in the country.

Until the next time Stay Safe.

Total Cases Worldwide – 404,431,058

Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,798,613

Total Recovered Worldwide – 324,413,108 

Total Active Cases Worldwide – 74,219,337 (18.3% of the total cases)

Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 330,211,721

Information and Resources:

https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/

https://www.reuters.com/business/