On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel Corona Virus Infectious Disease a pandemic. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines a pandemic as an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.
It has been three years since the WHO was officially notified about the emergence of the novel coronavirus on 31st December 2019. Medhealth.Info provides a summary update from various credible sources on the current situation of SARS-COV-2 globally.
Global Case Count:
As of 16 December 2022, there have been 647,972,911 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 6,642,832 deaths, reported to WHO.
As of 13 December 2022, a total of 13,008,560,983 vaccine doses have been administered.
Source: covid19.who.int (Retrieved 17th December, 2022 5:10GMT)
According to Statista.com, around 628 million people had recovered from the disease globally as of 9th December 2022. Therefore, Medhealth.Info estimates the total number of active COVID-19 cases at 13,330,079 cases globally.
The WHO Technical Lead on COVID-19, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, indicated in an #AskWho Online program that there are about 3.3 million cases reported weekly and about 8 thousand deaths weekly as of December 2022.
Hotspots
Where are the new COVID-19 hotspots in the world?
Dr. Maria stated that “we do see increases in case reports in the Americas and Western Pacific region and we do see increases in deaths in Africa, the Americas and in the Western Pacific regions”
Mutations and Variants
After three years of monitoring, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports a number of variants of SARS-COV-2 which may be classified into eleven Variants under Monitoring (Alpha, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Eta, Iota, Kappa, Mu, Zeta); one Variant of Concern (Omicron); no Variant of High Concern and currently no Variant of Interest (VoI).
The WHO in a publication dated 25th November 2022, on the topic: ‘One year since the emergence of COVID-19 virus variant Omicron’, states that there are over 500 sub-lineages of the omicron variant currently in circulation, but none has been designated as a new variant of high concern.
Will the virus get kicked out soon?
‘No, the virus will be with us forever’, the words of Dr. Mike Ryan (Executive Director of Health Emergency Programs, WHO), speaking in an #AskWHO online program on Thursday 15th December 2022. Citing the history of these viruses such as influenza, Dr. Ryan said “the rhythm of these pandemics is… a pandemic virus causes a major pandemic, it settles into a more endemic… I suspect this SARS-COV-2 will continue to evolve and we’ll have to remain vigilant for a very long time, essentially forever” and advised that people must learn to live with the virus in a positive way where the virus is doing minimal damage to our people, to our health and to our social and economic systems.
In conclusion, the WHO states that the world is in a better position to fight covid 19. “We’re in a much better position with COVID-19 than we’ve ever been in the past because we have so many tools that can fight against it and because countries and people have so much experience in dealing with the COVID-19 going forward”.
References
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-classifications.html#anchor_1632158885160
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
https://www.nytimes.com/article/coronavirus-timeline.html
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1087466/covid19-cases-recoveries-deaths-worldwide/
