‘US Covid-19 cases may cross 2 lakh per day in a couple of weeks’

People seen in masks on Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. Pic/AFP

United States (US) Covid-19 cases could exceed 200,000 a day as the latest surge of the virus driven by the Delta variant is "going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out", said National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

"I will be surprised if we don't cross 200,000 cases a day in the next couple of weeks, and that's heartbreaking considering we never thought we'd be back in that space again. That was January-February, that shouldn't be August," Xinhua news agency quoted Collins as saying on Fox News on Sunday.

"But here we are with Delta variant, which is so contagious, and this heartbreaking situation where 90 million people are still unvaccinated who are sitting ducks for this virus and that's the mess we're in," said Collins.

70% of active cases in Palestine is of Delta

A senior health official has confirmed that 70 per cent of the active Covid-19 cases in the Palestinian territories are of the Delta variant. Palestine might have already entered the fourth wave of the disease, as more infections and hospitalisations are being logged every day, Wesam Sbaihat, the official in charge of Covid-19 affairs in the Health Ministry, told state radio Voice of Palestine.

2,65,014
No. of new cases reported globally in the past 24 hours

20,74,34,515
Total no. of cases worldwide

43,66,332
Total no. of deaths worldwide

Source: WHO/Johns Hopkins

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