The daily Covid-19 cases continues to rise across the world, mainly after the detection of the Omicron variant in late November last year, with the single-day count till January 7 doubling in just 10 days.
An average of 2,106,118 new daily infections were reported between January 1 and 7, shortly after the one million case threshold was passed in the week of December 23-29, 2021, according to AFP.
Meanwhile, the world went past 304 million cases on Sunday, when the global body count soared further to 5,480,481.
How does it spread?
On Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the transmission was down to a combination of factors including the make-up of the Covid-19 variant and increased social mixing.
Omicron transmits very efficiently between people due to a number of reasons.
Firstly, its mutations allow the virus to adhere to human cells more easily. Secondly, immune escape. And this means that people can be reinfected either, if they had a previous infection or if they've been vaccinated.
"The other reason is that we are seeing replication of Omicron in the upper respiratory tract -- and that's different from Delta and other variants, including the ancestral strain which replicated in the lower respiratory tract, in the lungs," a WHO official said.
Also, the spread is being driven by the context of people mixing more, spending more time indoors, and not adhering to measures such as physical distancing.
Less severe than Delta, yet threatening
Omicron should not be categorised as “mild”, even as it appears to be less severe than the Delta variant, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Thursday.
“Just like previous variants, Omicron is hospitalising people and it is killing people,” Tedros said, adding: “In fact, the tsunami of cases is so huge and quick, that it is overwhelming health systems around the world.”
Experts, too, said this wave threatens to overwhelm health systems.
On Friday the French public health authority said the risk of hospitalisation was about 70% lower for Omicron, citing data from the US, the UK, Canada and Israel.
Experts said that the lack of severity may be due to widespread immunity, thanks to vaccination or previous infection.
But studies on animals point to another peculiarity: rather than affecting the lungs where severe Covid takes root, it seems to proliferate in the nose and throat.
This would not only explain the variant's less-dangerous symptoms but also its ability to spread quickly through coughing and sneezing.
"Even if the percentage of cases with severe disease is proportionally lower, when there are record cases, that still means record numbers of people in the hospital," tweeted US virologist Angela Rasmussen on Friday.
Unlike previous variant waves, however, this one seems so far to be affecting regular hospital admissions rather than ICU capacity.
"The more Omicron spreads, the more it transmits and the more it replicates, the more likely it is to throw out a new variant," WHO senior emergencies officer Catherine Smallwood said on Tuesday.