The World Health Organization (WHO), which has begun to receive more complete statistics on the extent of the wave of covid-19 in China, already places that country with at least 98 million registered infections, very close to what it has been for years. It has been the most affected country, the USA (now with 100 million cases).
At the current rate, China, the country where cases of the disease were first reported at the end of 2019, could soon become the most affected on the planet, after the incidence of the pandemic was much lower during the first three years in that and other East Asian countries than in regions like Europe or America.
The WHO update with data from China has also broken the record for cases registered in one week since the start of the pandemic: until now it was in January 2022, with the peak of the omicron wave (23 million global weekly cases ), in the third week of last December there were 44 million infections.
In its weekly epidemiological report, the WHO points out that in the last four weeks (from January 2 to 29) there were almost 20 million global cases, a decrease of 78%, but deaths increased by 65% to 114,000, figures all of them heavily influenced by the wave of infections in China.
In that four-week period (until now the WHO produced weekly statistics but has decided to establish almost monthly comparisons) China reported 11 million cases (85% less than in the previous 28 days), followed by the US with 1.5 million, South Korea with one million and Brazil with 459,000.
China was also the country with the most deaths in the period studied (62,000, an increase of 244%), while in the US they rose 31% (14,000) and in Japan 46% (10,000).
Since the start of the pandemic, at least 753 million people have been infected on the planet with covid-19, almost 10% of the world population, and 6.8 million have died, although the WHO always clarifies that these are the infections and registered deaths, but that the actual numbers could be much higher.
In China, for example, experts affirm that up to 80% of the national population, that is, some 1,100 million people, could have been infected with covid-19, especially as a result of the wave of cases unleashed when the drastic policies were lifted. of virus prevention known as “zero covid”.
(With information from EFE9