Mizuho with the warning:
We have made it a habit, early every Monday morning, to review the global status of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on figures listed on the Johns HopkinsUniversity web site. We want to know whether rise in new infections is accelerating or slowing down. We are particularly interested in whether any specific trends are emerging by country or region. As of early in the morning of 1 March, Japan time, a total of 113.98mn people were infected, an increase of2.72mn over the Monday before. It was the first rise in seven weeks. The pandemic is gathering pace again in India (the country with the second most infections in the world), third-placed Brazil, and a number of western European nations: France, Italy, and Germany. The pace of growth is accelerating in Poland and Turkey too.
The US remains the most infected nation on earth. Growth in new case numbers has slowed in each of the past seven weeks but that decline appears to be bottoming in daily terms. President Joe Biden warned during a speech in Texas on 26 February that the emergence of new strains could lead to renewed rises in infections and hospital admissions. Dr.Rochelle Walensky, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on the same day that “cases, hospital admissions, and deaths all remain very high.” Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told an NBC program that “you’ve got to get that baseline [level of cases] down lower than it is now, particularly in light of the fact that we have some worrisome variants that are in places like California and New York and others that we’re keeping our eye on.
