Shawdesh Desk:

The overall number of global coronavirus cases has surged past 289 million, with the new Covid strain Omicron showing a spike in hospitalisation.

According to Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the total case count mounted to 289, 237,881 while the death toll from the virus reached 5,440,154 Sunday morning.

Head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday that he’s worried about the omicron and delta variants of COVID-19 producing a “tsunami” of cases between them, but he’s still hopeful that the world will put the worst of the pandemic behind it in 2022, reports AP.

Two years after the coronavirus first emerged, top officials with the U.N. health agency cautioned that it’s still too early to be reassured by initial data suggesting that omicron, the latest variant, leads to milder disease.

First reported last month in southern Africa, it is already the dominant variant in the United States and parts of Europe.

And after 92 of the WHO’s 194 member countries missed a target to vaccinate 40% of their populations by the end of this year, Director-General Tedros Adhanom urged everyone to make a “new year’s resolution” to get behind a campaign to vaccinate 70% of countries’ populations by the beginning of July.

According to WHO’s figures, the number of COVID-19 cases recorded worldwide increased by 11% last week compared with the previous week, with nearly 4.99 million newly reported from Dec. 20-26. New cases in Europe — which accounted for more than half of the total — were up 3% while those in the Americas rose 39% and there was a 7% increase in Africa. The global gain followed a gradual increase since October.

The US has recorded 54,859,966 cases so far and more than 825,816 people have died from the virus in the country, the university data shows.

Brazil, which has been experiencing a new wave of cases since January, registered 22,295,621 cases as of Saturday and its Covid death toll rose to 619,367.

India’s COVID-19 tally rose to 34,861,579 on Saturday, as 22,775 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours across the country, showed the federal health ministry’s latest data.

Besides, 406 more deaths were recorded since Friday morning, taking the death toll to 481,486, which is a steep rise in the number of deaths in a single day.