The death toll from Covid-19 marks another negative record: almost 876,000 victims have been registered around the world since the end of December, while the number of people who have contracted the virus is now approaching 27 million. At the moment, the country with the highest rate of spread of the disease is India, which continues to grind sad primates: there have been over 86,000 infections in the last 24 hours, since it leads the Asian giant to exceed the threshold of four millions of cases. India is the third country in the world where the epidemic has reached this size, after the United States (6.3 million) and Brazil (4.1 million). The US remains the first country in the world also for the number of deaths, almost 188,000. A number that could even double by January according to a new model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington. The data is believed to be credible by US virologist Anthony Fauci: a “good warning” on what could happen if Americans do not take precautions. “If you do a lot of indoor activities and don’t use masks, it will most likely hit this number,” he cautioned.
In Europe, the high numbers recorded by France and Spain during the week continue to cause alarm, with thousands of infections. Russia also travels in the order of 5,000 cases per day, while the number of new infections in Germany remains stable, at around 1,400 per day. Meanwhile, for the first time since March, Sweden has recorded a lower rate than its neighbors, an average of 12 new cases per million people in the past week, compared to 18 in Denmark and 14 in Norway. The figure gives satisfaction to the architect of the soft strategy followed so far by Stockholm, the only one not to have applied any form of lockdown and to have kept practically everything open, relying on the self-discipline of its citizens and on the achievement of herd immunity: “We have gone from being one of the countries with the highest number of infections in Europe to one of those with the lowest number of cases – exulted the state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell -, while many others have seen a rather dramatic increase. Our sustainable policy may be slower in getting results, but in the end it gets them. “
In the rest of the world, Iran has also moved forward with the reopening of schools despite the number of cases on the rise, nearly 1,900 new infections in the past 24 hours. Only students in the highest risk areas will continue with distance learning. And the alarm still does not seem to have been overcome even in South Korea, which continues to register new cases despite a tracking and containment system that had quickly brought the country out of the first wave, among the first to be affected. Among the active cases at the moment, according to the health authorities, 1,156 are related to the Sarang-jeil church in Seoul and 510 to the anti-government demonstrations on August 15.
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