SOURCE: As­so­ci­at­ed Press

GENE­VA (AP) — The num­ber of coro­n­avirus cas­es re­port­ed glob­al­ly has dropped for a sec­ond con­sec­u­tive week and con­firmed COVID-19 deaths al­so fell last week, ac­cord­ing to a World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion re­port is­sued Wednes­day.

In its lat­est pan­dem­ic re­port, WHO said 9 mil­lion cas­es were re­port­ed, a 16% week­ly de­cline, and more than 26,000 new deaths from COVID-19. The U.N. health agency said con­firmed coro­n­avirus in­fec­tions were down in all re­gions of the world.

How­ev­er, it warned that the re­port­ed num­bers car­ry con­sid­er­able un­cer­tain­ty be­cause many coun­tries have stopped wide­spread test­ing for the coro­n­avirus, mean­ing that many cas­es are like­ly go­ing un­de­tect­ed.

WHO said it was al­so track­ing an omi­cron vari­ant that is a re­com­bi­na­tion of two ver­sions: BA.1 and BA.2, which was first de­tect­ed in Britain in Jan­u­ary. WHO said ear­ly es­ti­mates sug­gest the re­com­bined omi­cron could be about 10% more trans­mis­si­ble than pre­vi­ous mu­ta­tions, but fur­ther ev­i­dence is need­ed.

The agency has con­tin­ued to warn coun­tries not to drop their COVID-19 pro­to­cols too quick­ly and pre­dict­ed that fu­ture vari­ants could spread eas­i­ly if sur­veil­lance and test­ing sys­tems are shelved.

Last week, the U.K. said COVID-19 had hit record lev­els across the coun­try, with gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics es­ti­mat­ing that about 1 in 13 peo­ple were in­fect­ed. Those fig­ures came on the same day the British gov­ern­ment aban­doned its free test­ing pro­gram.

Mean­while, Chi­nese au­thor­i­ties con­duct­ed more mass test­ing this week across Shang­hai, which re­mains in lock­down fol­low­ing an­oth­er jump in in­fec­tions; the city has record­ed more than 90,000 cas­es but no deaths dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

De­spite grow­ing pub­lic frus­tra­tion and con­cerns about eco­nom­ic ef­fects, Chi­na says it is stick­ing to its hard-line “ze­ro-tol­er­ance” ap­proach man­dat­ing lock­downs, mass test­ing and the com­pul­so­ry iso­la­tion of all sus­pect­ed cas­es and close con­tacts. Fol­low­ing a pub­lic up­roar, Shang­hai au­thor­i­ties said Wednes­day they would al­low at least some par­ents to stay with chil­dren in­fect­ed with COVID-19, mak­ing an ex­cep­tion to a pol­i­cy of iso­lat­ing any­one who tests pos­i­tive.