Let’s face it: Things won’t be getting better any time soon.
The stark warning from global health experts comes after July yielded nearly as many …
Let’s face it: Things won’t be getting better any time soon. The stark warning from global health experts comes after July yielded nearly as many new coronavirus infections as the first six months of the pandemic put together – and the curve continues edging steadily upwards. More than eight million new Covid-19 cases were recorded last month, with numbers doubling every six weeks. The global total now stands at nearly 20 million, and over 700,000 people have died of the disease worldwide. August does not bode any better. “Nothing I have seen so far makes me optimistic,” public health strategist Bill Bowtell, an adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told The Sunday Times. “Globally, we are still in the first wave and there is little sign of abatement.” The pessimistic outlook has Prof Bowtell advocating a more ambitious strategy in curbing the pandemic – striving for elimination of the virus, rather than merely trying to keep numbers low. One in every four infected in July was from the United States, which reported a record 1.87 million cases last month, more than double its previous record month in April. Brazil saw 1.2 million infections last month out of its current total of nearly three million, while India saw 1.1 million cases of its two million tally. The fresh surges in the Americas and South Asia came even before the regions witnessed any notable decline in their epidemics despite scattered lockdowns. Other countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific saw spikes from new outbreaks after initial success in containment. Asia’s cautionary tales The Philippines became Southeast Asia’s latest coronavirus epicenter last week as its cases soared above 120,000 and its sprawling capital of Manila and surrounding areas went back under lockdown. The country had emerged from one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns only in June, as President Rodrigo Duterte sought to restart the economy that was spiraling into its deepest recession ever. But as people returned to normal life almost immediately, infections quickly rose again, from a seven-day average of 600 on June 1 to more than 4,200 on Friday. Yesterday, it reported another 4,131 new cases and 41 deaths. Vietnam, which had gone 100 days without community transmission and had not seen a single Covid-19 death initially, detected its latest outbreak in the central city of Danang in late July. In the span of a fortnight, the outbreak has spread to 13 cities and provinces, including the urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and led to over 300 new cases and 10 deaths. Its source remains unclear. In Malaysia, a nascent cluster of cases that originated from a restaurant owner, who had returned to Kedah from India and failed to follow quarantine rules, has spread to neighboring Perlis and Penang states, infecting about a dozen people. Japan, which had earlier been lauded for its successful model of limited testing and lack of lockdowns and legal enforcement, is also facing an aggressive resurgence of the virus that has spread rapidly from its capital of Tokyo to other urban areas and from younger, healthier people to the elderly over the past month. It now sees a daily average of over 1,300 cases compared with 100 at the beginning of last month. Experts have pointed the finger at complacency among both the government and its population that led to the economy and society reopening too much, too soon. Hong Kong, which was also thought to have had the virus under control despite never having imposed a lockdown, saw a growing number of new infections from last month, many with unknown origins.
