... WHO said COVID-19 infections dropped everywhere in the world while deaths decreased everywhere except for Southeast Asia, where they climbed by 15% and in the Western Pacific, where they rose by 3%.
At a press briefing Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said reported coronavirus deaths over the past month have surged 35%, and noted there had been 15,000 deaths in the past week.
Europe is at the center of a resurgence in Covid-19 infections as more people mix at large-scale events and travel, according to the World Health Organization.
“We are seeing a much more intense wave of the disease passing through Europe again,” Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said at a media briefing Wednesday. “And we will see it happen elsewhere -- we are already seeing it in South East Asia and in the eastern Mediterranean region as well.”
Overall, the number of Covid infections rose 30% globally in the past two weeks, with the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 driving the increase in Europe and the US. The agency said it was also following a new sublineage of subvariant BA2.75 which had been detected in India.
The increase in cases in Europe during the summer -- when transmission should be more difficult because people are outside -- results from people swapping one kind of mixing for another, such as attending large concerts and traveling more, Ryan said.