Covid rate 4th highest in the world
WALES now has the second highest Covid infection rate in Europe and the fourth highest in the world.
Across Europe, coronavirus is only spreading more rapidly in Latvia, a country which has just entered a strict month-long lockdown as their infection rate soars. Latvia has fully vaccinated 57% of its total population, compared to 71% in Wales.
Globally, Barbados and Georgia are the only other countries which have higher infection rates.
The figures, taken from Our World in Data (OWID), collate reported daily cases from each country around the world. The UK overall comes in at sixth in Europe, based on the rolling sevenday average infection rate for the period up to October 20.
In order to look at how Wales ranks internationally, we have calculated the Welsh infection rate using data from the UK Government coronavirus dashboard. The figure for the seven days to October 21 is an average of 1,053 cases a day for every million people. This puts Wales amongst the Baltic states which are leading the Covid surge across East Europe.
These figures differ marginally from the data published each day by Public Health Wales, as OWID calculates the infection rate based on the date a positive test result was reported and calculates a daily average per 1m people whereas PHW uses the figures from the date a test was taken and uses a sevenday rolling total for every 100k people.
The figures below show the rolling seven-day average daily infection rate for European countries only, up to October
20 (from OWID). Cases per million people: Lithuania: 971.266 Serbia: 955.548 Estonia: 857.452 Romania: 785.38 United Kingdom: 666.51 In Lithuania, health workers from two of the three largest hospitals in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius stopped accepting non-urgent patients due to surge of patients with severe coronavirus.
Latvia became the first country in Europe to reimpose coronavirus restrictions and on Wednesday it announced a month-long Covid-19 lockdown after an unprecedented surge in infections. In Serbia, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic, said on Wednesday a Covid-19 “health pass” will be mandatory for access to restaurants, cafes and bars in the evenings.
Wales’s Health Minister Eluned Morgan has refused to rule out new coronavirus restrictions this winter.
When asked about whether restrictions would need to be brought in, she said: “I don’t want to make any promises because rates are extremely high at the moment. We are not seeing the kind of reduction that we were hoping to see, like they have seen in Scotland.
“We will keep an eye on the situation. We hope that we will be able to not have the restrictions that we have seen before, but it is up to the Welsh public play their part as well and try and mix outdoors as much as possible, make sure there is ventilation, wash their hands.”