The global tally of COVID cases rose 25% in the period stretching from Dec. 5 to Jan. 1 to more than 14.5 million, the World Health Organization said Thursday, while the number of fatalities rose 21% to more than 46,000 in the month. In the latest week, cases appeared to fall, but the agency said those numbers were not reliable given the reduction in testing and delays in reporting during the year-end holiday period. BA.5 and its sublineages remained dominant, based on sequences sent to a central database, with six under monitoring, including XBB, which has become dominant in the U.S., the WHO said in its weekly epidemiological update. “We are concerned about its growth advantage, in particular in some countries in Europe and the Northeast part of the United States, where XBB.1.5 has rapidly replaced other circulating sub-variants,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID technical lead, told reporters on Wednesday, as Politico reported. U.S. numbers are also expected to be distorted by the holiday season. Tthe seven-day average stood at 64,087 on Wednesday, according to a New York Times tracker. That’s down 5% from two weeks ago and below the recent peak of 70,508 on Christmas Eve. The daily average for hospitalizations was up 7% at 44,458. The average for deaths was 457, up 11% from two weeks ago. The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 662.4 million on Thursday, while the death toll rose above 7.5 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. leads the world with 101 million cases and 1,095,235 fatalities.
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