While the majority of countries have lifted the health restrictions in force on their territories, in particular masks or the various health and vaccine passes, the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus and its many variants continues. On April 12, 2022, the bar of 500 million cases was crossed…
500 million cases of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic
If it is now certain that the Covid-19 pandemic began in November 2019, i.e. a few months before the first generalized confinement of the population which took place in March 2020 in France, this means that the virus does not exist. only for less than two and a half years. However, in such a short time, he will have succeeded in bringing the whole world to its knees.
As a reminder, the Covid-19 pandemic had caused a global recession: in France, GDP fell by 8.3% and few countries escaped negative growth. World GDP would have fallen by 3.5% over the same period.
However, if economically the recovery has been there since 2021, although made complicated by the war in Ukraine, the virus is far from having disappeared: on April 12, 2022, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, the 500 millionth case of contamination has been identified. This means that of the less than 8 billion people in the world, at least 1 in 16 has contracted the disease.
And these data are underestimated: some countries have had difficulty identifying cases of Covid-19 due to a lack of means, in particular health, while others are strongly suspected of having downplayed or even concealed the scale of the pandemic.
More than 6 million deaths, and new variants…
On the death side, the virus and all of its variants will have claimed 6.181 million lives worldwide. Several thousand people die from the disease every day, with peaks in recorded deaths exceeding 10,000 in 24 hours quite regularly.
And the situation is far from improving: with several hundred thousand, even several million, new cases of Covid-19 confirmed every day in the world, the pandemic continues. The virus mutates: the new XD and XE variants, recently discovered, seem to be more contagious.
XE: the new virus variant that worries
If the XD variant, nicknamed Deltacron because it has the characteristics of the Delta and Omicron variants, may have raised fears which, it seems, have not been proven, the XE variant is the new strain of Sars-CoV-2 virus. that health authorities are watching carefully.
Sequenced in the UK, XE, is a subvariant of Omicron. Very precisely, like XD, it is a virus that combines two strains, in the case of XE the BA.1 and BA.2 strains of Omicron.
It would be highly contagious, to the point that Professor Adrian Esterman, formerly an epidemiologist with the WHO, compared its contagiousness to that of the virus responsible for measles disease. However, measles is recognized as the most contagious disease currently known.