The world has reached a plateau in coronavirus infections, the WHO said.

Over the past few days, there have been approximately 650,000 new cases of COVID-19 reported daily worldwide.

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that the world is currently experiencing a plateau in coronavirus infections, as cases are rising again in several parts of the world.

According to data from Johns Hopkins University, in recent days there have been more than 650,000 daily cases of COVID-19 worldwide , almost double the number that were occurring at the end of July.

World Health Organization expert Maria Van Kerkhove stated that the plateau is at a high level.

“We have reached a plateau, but this plateau is at a sufficiently high level,” he stated, adding that between 4.4 and 4.5 million infections and 72,000 to 78,000 deaths are recorded daily worldwide due to COVID-19.

“But there is an uneven situation in different regions,” the expert explained, because while cases have fallen in Latin America in recent weeks, they have increased in some regions of Europe and Africa.

To date , nearly 219 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed worldwide, of which more than 40 million have occurred in the United States, the country most affected by the disease globally.

While the number of deaths from this cause reaches 4.55 million people, almost a third of them live in America.

Why is the delta variant of the coronavirus more contagious?

Although the delta variant of the coronavirus has been circulating the world for several months, since it appeared in India in October of last year, it was only recently that scientists discovered why it is much more contagious than other strains of the disease.

Research conducted by international investigators has shown that this variant is much more contagious than others and is also capable of partially evading the immune protection provided by the AstraZeneca vaccine . This conclusion was reached after analyzing a series of tests involving more than 130 healthcare workers in India and laboratory tests of this B.1.617.2 strain.

Experts were seeking to understand how this strain infects human tissue compared to other variants, such as B.1.1.7 or alpha. The paper revealed that the patients analyzed did not have a higher risk of hospitalization or death compared to other people infected with the other variants; however, they were found to have a greater chance of acquiring an infection after vaccination.

This is related to the fact that the delta variant, unlike the alpha variant, replicates better in lung cells, according to results obtained by Ravindra Gupta of the Institute of Immunology Therapeutics and Infectious Diseases in Cambridge , UK, and his colleagues in the academic journal Nature.

Analyses taken from 12 patients infected with Covid-19 in the UK in the middle of last year showed that the delta variant was 2.3 times less susceptible to immune system proteins called neutralizing antibodies.

Similarly, the group of experts discovered that the delta variant was almost six times less sensitive to the body's defenses, while the beta variant (discovered in South Africa) was up to eight times less sensitive.

“These data support the notion of a greater ease of infection of the B.1.617.2 variant, whether due to a higher viral load or a greater ability of the particles to infect, resulting in a higher probability of person-to-person transmission,” the scientists wrote.