Geneva: The number of deaths reported last week (19-25 July 2021) have increased sharply with over 69 000 deaths, a 21% increase when compared to the previous week, as per the World Health Organization’s Weekly Epidemiological Update report released today.
The cumulative number of cases and deaths reported globally is almost 194 million and over 4 million respectively. If these trends continue, it is expected that the cumulative number of cases reported globally could exceed 200 million in the next two weeks.
The global number of new cases reported last week (19-25 July 2021) was over 3.8 million, an 8% increase as compared to the previous week. An average of around 540 000 cases were reported each day over the past week as compared to 490 000 cases reported daily the week before. This increasing trend is largely attributed to substantial increases in the Region of the Americas and the Western Pacific Region.
Over the past week, the highest numbers of new cases were reported from the United States of America (500 332 new cases; 131% increase), Brazil (324 334 new cases; 13% increase), Indonesia (289 029 new cases; 17% decrease), the United Kingdom (282 920 new cases; 5% decrease), and India (265 836 new cases; similar to the previous week).
The highest numbers of new deaths were reported from Indonesia (9697 new deaths; 3.5 new deaths per 100 000; a 36% increase), Ecuador (8864 new deaths; 50.2 new deaths per 100 000; +7349%), Brazil (7942 new deaths; 3.7 new deaths per 100 000; -9%), India (6942 new deaths; 0.5 new deaths per 100 000; a 25% increase), the Russian Federation (5455 new deaths; 3.7 new deaths per 100 000; a 1% increase),
Globally, cases of the Alpha variant have been reported in 182 countries, territories or areas (hereafter countries; two new countries in the past week), while 131 countries (two new countries) have reported cases of the Beta variant; 81 countries (three new countries) have reported cases of the Gamma variant; and 132 countries (eight new countries) have reported cases of the Delta variant.
As of July 20, 2021, six vaccine types (AstraZeneca-Vaxzevria, Janssen Ad26.COV 2.5, Moderna-mRNA-1273, Pfizer BioNTech-Comirnaty, COVID-19 vaccine BIBP, and Sinovac-CoronaVac) have received WHO emergency use listing (EUL) based, in part, on vaccine efficacy results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
The World Health Organization (WHO) stated today that evaluations of the effectiveness of multiple COVID-19 vaccines in different settings and populations are needed to assess how well these vaccines work in preventing symptomatic disease, severe disease, hospitalization, death, as well as infection and transmission, among other outcomes. Moreover, answers to some important public health questions can only be addressed by post-introduction Vaccine Effectiveness (VE)studies, such as: whether additional doses would be needed to address declines in VE over time, or whether new vaccines or additional doses will be needed for SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs). Vaccine effectiveness estimates may differ from the results of RCTs for valid reasons (e.g., different target populations, different vaccine schedule) or for invalid reasons (e.g., bias and confounding). However, biases and confounding can be minimized by careful planning, execution and analysis of VE studies.
As of 20 July 2021, there have been over 90 VE studies made publicly available in peer-reviewed or pre-print literature, though the quality of these studies varies considerably. (Vaccine effectiveness (VE) is the percentage reduction in the risk or odds of disease or infection among vaccinated persons).
The evidence base to date has been skewed, with 62% of studies coming from three countries with early introduction of vaccination campaigns (i.e. Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States of America); and 71% reporting on VE of only two vaccines – Pfizer BioNTech-Comirnaty and AstraZeneca-Vaxzevria. In general, symptomatic disease efficacy results from these studies, for fully vaccinated individuals, have been similar to the results of the RCTs that informed the WHO emergency use listing (EUL) decision. Overall, VE against severe disease, hospitalization and death has been higher than against non-severe symptomatic disease, with VE estimates for these more serious outcomes to be above 80% for AstraZeneca-Vaxzevria, Moderna-mRNA-1273, Pfizer BioNTech- Comirnaty, and Sinovac-CoronaVac.
– global bihari bureau
