Weekly epidemiological update on COVID-19 - 28 September 2021

Overview

Globally, the numbers of weekly COVID-19 cases and deaths continued to decline. Over 3.3 million new cases and over 55 000 new deaths were reported during the week of 20 – 26 September 2021, decreases of 10% as compared to the previous week for both cases and deaths. The largest decrease in new weekly cases was reported from the Eastern Mediterranean Region (17%), followed by the Western Pacific Region (15%), the Region of the Americas (14%), the African Region (12%) and the South-East Asia Region (10%); while weekly cases in the European Region were similar to the previous week. The cumulative number of confirmed cases reported globally is now over 231 million and the cumulative number of deaths is more than 4.7 million.

In this edition, two special focus updates are provided on:

• Approaches to determining waning COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness
• SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern (VOCs) Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta which includes updates on the geographic distribution of VOCs