After having registered a record high in daily Covid-19 cases earlier this week, South Korea is now seeing a slight dip in cases. Similarly, China registered a decline in new Covid-19 cases on Sunday after recording the first Covid death in more than a year on Saturday.
While this news from the two nations that are currently witnessing Covid-19 outbreaks seems reassuring, a World Health Organisation spokesperson said on Friday that the pandemic is far from over.
The end of the Coronavirus pandemic was a long way off, the World Health Organization warned this week, with several nations across the world witnessing a spike in Covid cases yet again.
With some South East Asian nations also seeing a surge, India has been prompted to keep the guards up. China is battling with a rise in daily cases driven by the highly infectious 'stealth Omicron variant'. The country saw its first deaths since January 2021 this week.
China’s health authorities reported two COVID-19 deaths on Saturday, the first since January 2021, as the country battles its worst outbreak in two years driven by a surge in the highly transmissible omicron variant.
The deaths, both in northeastern China’s Jilin province, bring the country’s coronavirus death toll to 4,638.
Both fatalities occurred in elderly patients and were the result of their underlying conditions, Jiao Yahui, an official with the National Health Commission, told a news briefing on Saturday. One of them had not been vaccinated for COVID-19, she said.
Nationwide, China has reported more than 29,000 cases since the beginning of March, including those without symptoms.
On Sunday, the daily Covid-19 cases in South Korea stayed below 400,000 for the second day running. As per The Korea Herald, the nation registered 334,708 new cases on Sunday while it had recorded 381,454 cases on Saturday.
This is a sharp drop from the nation’s all-time high on Thursday, when it recorded 621,281 new cases in 24 hours.
South Korea also recorded 327 new Covid-19 deaths in 24 hours on Sunday. Meanwhile, the government is set to ease social distancing rules this week as part of efforts to help businesses survive.
Hong Kong’s leader said Sunday that the government would consider lifting strict social distancing measures as new COVID-19 infections in the city continued trending downward.
“I wouldn’t promise now that there’s room for adjustment,” Chief Executive Carrie Lam said. “But following a review, we have a duty to account for the findings in this review and the direction we will take.”
Hong Kong is in the middle of a massive outbreak, recording over 1 million total cases in the city of 7.4 million. The city has been hit hard, with mortuaries full as they try to cope with a high number of deaths. Hong Kong has so far refrained from a strict city-wide lockdown like those that China regularly imposes to control the spread of the virus.
But new infections in the city have been declining. In early March, Hong Kong reported more than 50,000 new infections in one day. On Saturday, it recorded 16,583 new cases.
“Having gone through the peak that you have seen here... I think a responsible government should regularly and vigorously review these measures, to see whether there is room for adjustment,” Lam said.
