The virus resides in the US, Brazil, India

Pandemic is now raging mainly in the Americas

The first peak in Europe is over, other continents are struggling to control the corona epidemic. Take the US, for example, where the virus peaked just under a week after the height of the European epidemic. The number of confirmed infections leveled off, but there is now an upturn. Over 200,000 new infections were added in the past week.

In the United States, the epidemic has moved from the east, which has entered calmer waters, to the southern states. More young adults also seem to be infected there.

Brazil is facing the biggest problems in South America. More than 50,000 deaths were registered there. In the past week, more than 20,000 and sometimes more than 40,000 new patients were registered every day. More than a million Brazilians have now tested positive for corona – in reality there are many more cases because relatively few are tested. The epidemic is major in Asia in India, which now finds around 15,000 new cases every day, and in neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Germany: R peaked high

New hot spots are also being discovered in Europe. In Germany, the reproduction number R, which represents the average number of people infected by a patient, was well above 1. That is to say, the epidemic is growing.

Germany had to deal with one major outbreak in a slaughterhouse in the town of Gütersloh, in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In a short time, an infection was detected in more than a thousand employees. In a flat in Göttingen there was a somewhat smaller outbreak after the Sugar Feast – several residents had not kept enough distance.

In both cases, the authorities intervened firmly – the flat was cut off from the outside world. The slaughterhouse employees must also be quarantined, just like the residents of areas where many employees live. The measures seem to help: according to the latest figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German RIVM, the R has dropped below 1 again. The fact that the R fluctuates heavily, according to the RKI, is due to the low number of infected persons in Germany.

Spain: different hot spots

Spain also has to deal with smaller outbreaks, although there are a lot more than in Germany. Here, too, the sources have probably been traced, but they are more diverse: from fruit pickers in the province of Huesca in the north of the country, to an outbreak in the southern Spanish city of Málaga in a center of the Red Cross. A number of clusters have also been found in nursing homes.

The outbreaks are smaller than those in Germany – it often involves several dozen infections. The total number of infections in Spain has been fairly stable since the beginning of June, with between two and three hundred positive tests daily. But the new outbreaks are raising concerns with the holiday season on the way. The outbreaks are fragmented across the country, making control with targeted measures difficult. In Spain, too, measures have been tightened in some regions and limited travel between regions, for example.

South Korea: second wave

Is the first wave still lagging in South Korea, or has the second started? After the first peak in February, South Korea had pretty much controlled the epidemic, but the number of confirmed infections has started to rise again in recent weeks. It is a second wave, said Jung Eun-kyeong of the Korean Public Health Research Institute. According to Jung, the second wave started with a holiday period in early May, when the virus spread.

The first new cases were linked to an entertainment area in Seoul, but new outbreaks have now been traced to department stores and office buildings in and around the capital. Seventeen crew members of two Russian ships berthed in a port in South Korea were also tested positive.

Measures have been tightened around Seoul: public buildings such as museums and libraries have been closed. If the number of infections does not decrease, the rules may be tightened across the country.

Nevertheless, the numbers of positive tests remain low: several dozen new patients are discovered every day. There has also been little growth since the beginning of May. That was very different during the first wave, when the number could double within two days and almost a thousand infections were found in one day at its peak.

Moreover, by comparison: 394 new corona patients were discovered in the Netherlands in the past week. More than in South Korea – there were 296 there.