As the world faces an Omicron wave, Ontario records a single-day high of 10,436 COVID-19 instances. To prevent the spread of COVID-19 ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Chinese government has put a rigorous lockdown on the roughly 13 million citizens of Xi’an.
As the new Omicron strain of the virus rushes out of command, keeping employees at home and overloading testing centres, daily COVID-19 infections have reached new highs in the United States, swaths of Europe, and Australia.
The frequently evolving coronavirus is causing chaos in many parts of the world, forcing governments to reassess quarantine and testing procedures almost two years after China first reported clustering of “viral pneumonia” infections in the city of Wuhan.
Although some research has suggested that the Omicron variant is less lethal than its precedents, many people who have tested positive will leave hospitals in some countries heavily burdened. Businesses may find it difficult to continue operating due to workers being quarantined.
“Delta and Omicron now are twin concerns,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Tedros said at a news conference on Wednesday. “They are driving up cases to historic levels, contributing to rises in hospitalisation and mortality.”
“I’m quite concerned that Omicron is causing a tsunami of cases because it’s extremely infectious and spreading at the same time as Delta.” On Tuesday, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Malta set new case records.
On Tuesday, single-day COVID-19 case highs were recorded in several Canadian provinces, including Quebec, Manitoba, and two Atlantic provinces, as health authorities across the country wrestled with stresses on testing and tracking systems.
According to a Reuters count, the average number of daily COVID-19 cases in the United States has likewise reached an all-time high in the last seven days. In January of this year, the previous high was reached.
Source: CBC News
