Shawdesh Desk:

Amid a global scare over the new Omicron strain of Covid-19, the overall number of coronavirus cases is inching closer to the 300-million mark.

According to Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the total case count mounted to 299,981,503 while the death toll from the virus reached 5,471,816 on Friday morning.

The US has recorded 58,446,019 cases so far and more than 833,952 people have died from the virus in the country, the university data shows.

Nearly 718,000 Covid cases were reported Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US. Omicron is currently the culprit in more than 90% of the US cases, a dizzying rise from less than 10% two weeks ago.

Brazil, which has been experiencing a new wave of cases since last January, registered 22,395,322 cases as of Thursday, while its Covid death toll rose to 619,654.

India’s Covid-19 tally rose to 35,223,770 on Thursday, as a record 114,484 new cases were registered in 24 hours across the country, as per the health ministry’s latest data.

Besides, as many as 360 deaths due to the pandemic since Tuesday morning took the total death toll to 482,911.

The country has detected a total of 2,630 cases of Omicron variant of coronavirus across its 23 states and Union Territories so far.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that a record 9.5 million Covid-19 cases were tallied over the last week as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus swept the planet, a 71% increase from the previous 7-day period that the UN health agency likened to a “tsunami.” However, the number of weekly recorded deaths declined.

In its weekly report on the pandemic, the agency said the weekly count amounted to 9,520,488 new cases — with 41,178 deaths recorded last week compared to 44,680 in the week before that.

WHO officials have long cited a lag between case counts and deaths, with changes in the death counts often trailing about two weeks behind the evolution of case counts. But they have also noted that for several reasons — including rising vaccination rates in some places, and signs that Omicron affects the nose and throat more than the lungs — Omicron has not appeared as deadly as the Delta variant that preceded it.