Portugal is the 11th European country with the fewest new daily cases per million inhabitants
Portugal is this week the 11th country in the European Union (EU) with the fewest new cases of infection by SARS-CoV-2 per million inhabitants in seven days, according to the statistical website Our World in Data.
This week the country rose from 386 new cases per day to 433 per million inhabitants, however, it is still below the EU average, which dropped from 559 new cases per million inhabitants to 541.
The EU country with the highest average of new cases is now Denmark, one of the countries in the world that has detected the most cases of the new Omicron variant of the virus responsible for covid-19, which has gone from 1,130 to 1,550 new cases per million population .
This is followed by Slovakia, which drops from 1,460 cases to 1,020, Ireland (up from 893 to 945), the Czech Republic (down from 1,250 to 919) and Belgium (down from 1,260 to 860).
Among the countries in the world with more than one million inhabitants, Denmark is repeated as the country with the highest number of cases in the last seven days, followed by the United Kingdom (1,140), Switzerland (1,050), Slovakia and Ireland.
With regard to deaths per million inhabitants, Portugal went from ninth to eighth EU country with fewer deaths found to covid-19, with a daily average of 1.69 in the last seven days, virtually unchanged from the average of 1 .7 from last week.
In this indicator, the European average is 4.51, and the worst numbers at European level are located to the east: Slovakia (17.3), Hungary (16.3), Croatia (12.7), Poland (11.4 ) and Bulgaria (11.3).
These numbers are also the highest in the world among countries with more than one million inhabitants, a list topped by Trinidad and Tobago with 17.6 daily deaths per million inhabitants.
The world average of new daily cases per million population is 82, while globally there were 0.9 new deaths per million population attributed to covid-19.
Covid-19 has caused more than 5.35 million deaths worldwide since the start of the pandemic, according to the latest report by Agence France-Presse.
In Portugal, since March 2020, 18,796 people have died and 1,227,854 cases of infection have been recorded, according to data from the General Directorate of Health.
The respiratory disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China, and currently with variants identified in several countries.
A new variant, an Omicron, classified as concerned by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been detected in southern Africa, but since the South African health authorities raised the alert on 24 November, infections have been reported in at least 89 countries from all continents, including Portugal.