SOURCE: As­so­ci­at­ed Press

BERLIN (AP) — The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion says that the num­ber of re­port­ed new COVID-19 cas­es world­wide de­creased by near­ly a quar­ter last week, con­tin­u­ing a de­cline since the end of March.

The Gene­va-based U.N. health agency said in a week­ly re­port that near­ly 5.59 mil­lion cas­es were re­port­ed be­tween April 11 and 17, 24% few­er than in the pre­vi­ous week. The num­ber of new­ly re­port­ed deaths dropped 21% to 18,215.

WHO said new cas­es de­clined in every re­gion, though on­ly by 2% in the Amer­i­c­as. The re­port was dat­ed late Wednes­day and sent to jour­nal­ists on Thurs­day.

The agency said that “these trends should be in­ter­pret­ed with cau­tion as sev­er­al coun­tries are pro­gres­sive­ly chang­ing their COVID-19 test­ing strate­gies, re­sult­ing in low­er over­all num­bers of tests per­formed and con­se­quent­ly low­er num­bers of cas­es de­tect­ed.”

The coun­tries with the high­est re­port­ed case num­bers last week were South Ko­rea with more than 972,000, France with over 827,000 and Ger­many with more than 769,000, WHO said. The high­est num­bers of new deaths were re­port­ed by the U.S., with 3,076, Rus­sia with 1,784 and South Ko­rea with 1,671.

In all, more than 502 mil­lion cas­es of COVID-19 and near­ly 6.2 mil­lion deaths re­lat­ed to the coro­n­avirus have been re­port­ed so far.