Data has shown a pick-up in the pandemic in every region of the world amid fears of a second wave of infections.
“We will not be going back to the ‘old normal’. The pandemic has already changed the way we live our lives,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) director-general, said this week.
Almost 40 countries have reported record daily increases in coronavirus cases over the past week, about double the number that did so in the previous week, according to a Reuters tally.
“We’re asking everyone to treat the decisions about where they go, what they do and who they meet with as life-and-death decisions – because they are.”
Reuters reported that the rate of cases had been increasing not only in countries like the United States, Brazil and India, which have dominated headlines with large outbreaks, but in Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Bolivia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Uzbekistan and Israel, among others.
The data, which was compiled from official reports, showed a steady rise in the number of countries reporting record daily increases in cases over the past month – with at least seven countries recording such increases three weeks ago, at least 20 countries last week and 37 countries this week.
