Covid-19 cases wane in India but rise in China, Europe

India's Covid-19 cases have fallen under 3,000 weeks after a raging Omicron wave. Where do other countries stand?

Weeks after reporting over 4 lakh cases daily during a surge led by the Omicron variant of Covid-19, India's coronavirus tally has shrunk with just over 2,000 cases logged on Wednesday. Even as India's numbers are showing an increased immunity towards the virus, some pockets around the world in Asia and Europe are still reporting a high number of cases.

Experts believe that this could be a late arrival of the Omicron variant in countries that are now showing a surge in cases, including China and the UK and Germany in Europe.

Global Covid-19 situation

After more than two years of mostly fighting off Covid, Hong Kong has become the world’s worst hot spot. It is spreading rapidly in New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and several other Pacific countries that had kept caseloads low.

Europe has often been a few weeks before the US with Covid trends — and cases are now rising in Britain, Germany, Italy and some other parts of Europe. The main cause appears to be an even more contagious version of omicron, known as BA.2.

BA.2 has already begun to spread in the US, as well. It accounted for about 12 per cent of newly diagnosed cases last week, according to the CDC.

BA.2 may be about to end two months of falling case counts in the US. Since mid-January, the number of new daily Covid cases has dropped more than 95 per cent and is now at its lowest level since last summer, before the delta surge.

In the past 10 weeks, China has reported more new local symptomatic cases - more than 14,000 - than in all of 2021 amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, fuelling fears of hard lockdowns of cities and economic instability.

Covid-19 in India

The third wave of the pandemic has waned and reached its fag end, with the number of daily cases falling from a peak of about 350,000 in late January to a few thousand across the country. Though the number of cases may not be a correct measure of the state of the pandemic after the government revised its testing strategy, other parameters like mortality, hospitalisation and positivity rates have also declined. The 7-day positivity rate is at its lowest at the national level, and the pandemic is now localised in some states or parts of states.

Data from MoHFW

Even as crowds come back to the streets and companies reopen to businesses as usual, research by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-K) predicts that the fourth wave of Covid-19 may set in around June 22 and the surge will continue for about four months. However, the severity of the wave will depend on the emergence of new variants, vaccination status and administration of booster doses, the study said.

The cumulative doses administered in India so far under the nationwide vaccination drive has exceeded 180.60 crore. The government also started inoculating those aged between 12 and 14 years on Wednesday.

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