The Coronavirus spread threatens Southeast Asia and elsewhere

As the virus threatens Southeast Asia, the spread of new variants continues to be a danger everywhere

After a devastating year with wave after wave of coronavirus infections around the world, new cases and deaths are falling in many of the Western nations that were once among the hardest hit. But while the virus recedes in wealthy nations with robust vaccination campaigns, it is pummeling India and threatening to swamp Southeast Asian countries that until now had largely kept the virus at bay.

Taken together, the opposing regional trends add up to a leveling of global daily new cases at “an unacceptably high plateau” that leaves the world in continuing danger, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday.

In Southeast Asia, Dr. Tedros noted that “cases and deaths are still increasing rapidly.”

Cambodia and Thailand, which kept the virus under control throughout 2020, have lately recorded sharp increases in infections. Malaysia announced a new nationwide lockdown on Monday, two days after recording its highest daily case total since January.

Scientists warn that if the virus is allowed to spread unchecked in parts of the world with lower vaccine coverage, dangerous variants will continue to evolve, threatening all countries.

“Globally, we are still in a perilous situation,” Dr. Tedros said. About 772,000 new cases are reported on average each day globally, nearly half in India, where a virus variant, B.1.617, has been spreading.

The W.H.O. deemed B.1.617 “a variant of concern” on Monday. Other variants of concern include B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain and now dominant in the United States, and P.1, originally detected in Brazil. ...

Dr. Robert Schooley, chief of the infectious disease division at the University of California San Diego, said that the global rate of cases “remains quite volatile.”

“We’re going to see a bit of a Whac-a-Mole situation for some time to come, as local and regional outbreaks flare up and burn out,” Dr. Schooley said. This will continue to be the case, he said, as long as a substantial part of the global population remains unvaccinated.

While new virus variants make a difference, said Dr. Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who helped devise the country’s coronavirus response, “the major factors shaping the rise and fall of the pandemic are the behavior of governments and their responses to the pandemic.”

Dr. Baker noted that more than one-fifth of the world’s population lives in countries that have essentially stamped out the virus, including China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand, and some wealthy nations are vaccinating their people rapidly enough to bring transmission rates down substantially. “However, many low- and middle-income countries have far less access to vaccine and other control measures, so are continuing to experience poorly controlled epidemics,” he said. ...