COVID deaths up 40 percent worldwide as cases drop: WHO

The World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday that while there was a decreasing trend in the number of new global COVID-19 cases last week, the number of weekly deaths related to the virus increased.

In its weekly epidemiological update, the WHO said that the number of new weekly deaths increased by 43 percent the week of March 21 to March 27, a spike driven by “changes in the definition of COVID-19 deaths in countries in the region of the Americas and retrospective adjustments reported from India in the South-East Asia Region.”

Chile, the U.S., India, Russia and South Korea topped the list with the highest number of new weekly deaths reported, according to the WHO.

The report added that the number of new cases saw a 14 percent decline during the same week, when compared to the previous week.

The international body added that across the six WHO regions, more than 10 million new cases and more than 45,000 new deaths were reported.

However, the WHO urged caution in interpreting the recent trends, noting that several countries are “progressively changing” their COVID-19 testing strategies, which may result in lower overall numbers of tests performed and consequently lower numbers of cases detected.

According to the WHO, despite a generalized decline in the rate of COVID-19 testing observed across the six WHO regions, the number of new weekly cases increased again in early to mid-March, which it said indicates that “the virus is currently circulating at very high levels.”

“Data are becoming progressively less representative, less timely, and less robust. This inhibits our collective ability to track where the virus is, how it is spreading and how it is evolving: information and analyses that remain critical to effectively end the acute phase of the pandemic,” the report read.

It further cautioned countries against reducing the quality of surveillance, saying doing so could lead to an increase in hospitalization and death, put a strain on health care systems and impair countries’ ability to detect and respond to new variants early.

“COVID-19 remains a Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” the report said.

The WHO recommended that member states focus on early warning and trend monitoring, which could alert to a change in the transmission dynamics of the virus, and continue with the daily tracking and reporting of cases and deaths for the duration of “the acute phase of the pandemic.”

The WHO also advocated that countries enhance their genomic surveillance to detect variants and monitor the coronavirus’s evolution.

The report came as the WHO said last week that omicron subvariant BA.2 is the predominant COVID-19 variant driving infections around the world. 

As of Sunday, more than 479 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 6 million deaths have been reported globally since the pandemic began, the report said.