The Covid-19 pandemic continued its retreat around the world this week, but infections were still raging in hotspots in Asia and Oceania, led by Hong Kong and New Zealand, report agencies.
The overall number of Covid cases has surged past 442 million.
According to Worldometers tally, the total case count mounted to 442,828,385 while the death toll from the virus reached 6,004,241 Friday evening.
More than 10.86 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. The latest rate was roughly 35.7 million doses a day.
The average number of global daily cases dropped for the fifth week in a row, shrinking by 12 per cent to 1.47 million, according to an AFP tally to Thursday.
Daily infections have fallen by half since peaking at 3.37 million in late January with the highly contagious Omicron variant.
The confirmed cases only reflect a fraction of the actual number of infections, with varying counting practices and levels of testing in different countries.
This week, Asia and Oceania bucked a global improvement, seeing the number of cases spike by 25 per cent and 72 per cent respectively compared to the previous week.
The situation markedly improved in all other regions of the world, with 45 percent less cases in the Middle East, 40 percent less in the Latin America-Caribbean zone, 34 percent less in Africa, 23 percent less in the United States-Canada zone and 22 percent less in Europe.
New Zealand recorded the biggest increase in new cases, with an almost seven-fold spike (590 per cent).
Hong Kong was hot on its heels with 403 per cent more cases. Then came Vietnam with 119 percent more, South Korea 40 percent more and Thailand 19 percent more.
The main drops came in Central Asia and the Caucasus, led by Azerbaijan where cases plummeted by 63 per cent. In neighbouring Armenia, cases dropped by three fifths and by 52 per cent in Georgia. In Panama, the number of cases dropped by 51 per cent and in Israel by half.
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