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| - India -- which now accounts for than more 40 percent of the world's new Covid cases -- broke a series of grim records for a second week, while the pace of the pandemic slowed in Europe and North America. Here is the global state of play according to a specialised AFP database. The number of daily cases set new records, increasing to an average of more than 821,000 per day, four percent more than last week. This was again down to a surge of cases in Asia -- up 28 percent -- and in particular in overwhelmed India where an average of nearly 350,000 new cases a day were recorded. New cases were also up four percent in Africa but remained stable in Latin America and the Caribbean. Elsewhere the caseload continued to decline, by 32 percent in Oceania, 18 percent in Europe, 13 percent in the Middle East and 12 percent in the United States and Canada. Nepal remained by far the country where the epidemic picked up most speed this week, with 151 percent more cases among the countries which have recorded at least 1,000 daily. Costa Rica followed with 69 percent more, Thailand with 45 percent more and India with 32 percent more. Cases were up more than a fifth in Malaysia. The number of confirmed cases only reflects a fraction of the actual number of infections, as different countries have varying counting practices and levels of testing. The biggest drops were in Poland, where cases declined by 39 percent, and Hungary with 33 percent less. Cases were down a third in Jordan and fell 31 percent in both Romania and Turkey. After India, the countries recording the highest number of new cases this week were Brazil, which was stable at 60,400 per day, the US which recorded 52,400 (down 13 percent), Turkey (41,000 cases) and France (26,300, down 17 percent). On a per capita basis Cyprus topped the table with 621 cases per 100,000 of the population. India also mourned the most deaths over the past week with 2,882 per day on average, before Brazil (2,526), the US (701), Colombia (458) and Iran (426). Globally, the number of daily deaths increased by 10 percent this week to 13,304 per day. They remain lower than at the beginning of the year when they skirted 15,000 per day. Since the start of the pandemic more than 150 million cases of Covid-19 and more than 3,168,333 deaths have been recorded around the world, according to an AFP count based on official sources Friday. rbj/jmy/fg/kjl
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