The United States, Denmark and France announced this Wednesday, December 29, to have exceeded their respective records for daily contaminations.
The three countries are facing a massive epidemic rebound linked in particular to the Omicron variant.
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France has crossed for the first time the threshold of 200,000 cases, according to figures unveiled by the Minister of Health Olivier Véran, a record since the start of the pandemic. Some 208,000 cases have been recorded in the last 24 hours in France, "
figures that make you dizzy
", announced the minister during a hearing at the National Assembly. On Tuesday evening, Public Health France had announced nearly 180,000 cases of Covid-19 in 24 hours, which was already a record.
The United States, facing a worrying fifth wave of Covid-19 fueled by the Omicron variant, on Tuesday recorded a record average of 265,427 new cases per day since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The seven-day average of daily cases in the country, the world's most bereaved, surpassed the previous peak recorded in the third wave, in January 2021, to nearly 252,000 cases.
Almost a million cases detected every day around the world
Denmark, currently the country in the world with the most new cases of Covid-19 relative to its population, shattered its all-time high on Wednesday with 23,228 additional cases in 24 hours. However, this record is largely explained by a very large number of PCR tests carried out after Christmas, the rate of positive tests remaining almost stable, at 12.3%, according to data from the health authorities. The previous peak was reached on Monday with 16,164 cases in 24 hours. The Danish incidence means that more than one in 60 inhabitants has tested positive in the past week.
For the moment, while the hospitalization curve in the United States is also on the rise, with around 9,000 new patients with Covid-19 hospitalized daily in the United States, this is still far from the 16,500 hospitalizations per day recorded in early January 2021, according to CDC data. Around 1,200 people currently die on average from Covid-19 in the country - a year ago the peak was around 3,400 daily deaths. In Denmark, the number of people currently hospitalized has increased slightly to 675 patients (+9 in 24 hours) including 77 (+6) in intensive care, but the progression remains significantly slower than the increase in the number of cases.
According to official data collected by AFP, Denmark is currently by far the country with the highest incidence in the world, with more than 1,700 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last seven days.
It is ahead of Malta (1333), followed by Ireland (1312), Iceland (1201) and the United Kingdom (1173).
The world has reached new contamination records over the past week, with more than 935,000 cases of Covid-19 detected every day on average from December 22 to 28, according to an AFP count made from official reports.