Health networks around the world confirmed today almost 3.4 million COVID-19 infections in the last 24 hours, a new daily record at a time when the omicron variant is already the dominant one, according to provisional data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
On the same day, the same new positives were registered that were added in the first four months of the pandemic, and the accumulated in two years amounts to 312 million, a conservative figure, since the WHO expects that many of the cases have not been diagnosed or notified to health networks.
The exponentially rising curve of infections continues without affecting the death statistics, which remains stable and around 7,000 deaths per day (7,700 in the last 24 hours).
The WHO insists that despite the predominance of non-serious cases in the current wave, omicron’s ability to cause damage should not be underestimated, as many health systems are under pressure from increased infections.
It also predicts that it will not be the last "variant of concern" of the coronavirus that will be detected, without being able to predict whether the next one will cause a more or less serious type of disease.
The omicron variant, first detected in South Africa at the beginning of November 2021, is already present in 58.5% of the analyzes carried out by the global network of GISAID laboratories, which indicates that it is already the dominant one, surpassing the predominance it had. delta for much of the past year.
The wave of infections by omicron, which began in Africa and which in December was already evident in Europe or America, is notorious in all the regions studied by the WHO, with almost vertical increases in the contagion curves on all continents (in the South Asia cases increased fivefold last week).
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