With the awakening of the new year, COVID-19 cases have doubled from 5 days ago till today, Wednesday. 

“We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases,” Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday. “The acceleration of cases that we have seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we’ve seen before,” he added.

The US tally for recorded cases on New Years Eve was around 590,000, which has surpassed a million by now as Omicron ripped through the states, according to Bloomberg. 

The current number of recorded cases exceeds twice the number of recorded cases in any country during the pandemic. In May 2021, as the Delta variant surged, India reported some 414,000 cases, setting a record, which has now been broken. 

According to recent data from Johns Hopkins University, almost 1 in 100 Americans have been infected with COVID-19 in only the past week. However, that is an understatement, as US citizens are undertested, indicating more cases than the numbers at hand. Many are also taking at-home tests, where reports to officials won't be reached. 

Around the world, infections have increased 83% over the previous week, as 11 million cases are being declared every week, according to USA Today. 

Furthemore, when it came to hospitalizations, numbers of in-patients treated for COVID-19 have exceeded 100,000, as 113,000 patients are currently in hospital diagnosed with the virus, marking a 26% increase from last week.

About 1,350 children are admitted into the hospital on a daily basis due to COVID-19, indicating that not even children are spared from its effects. 

“I have never seen an infection sweep an entire country in a matter of a week or two,” said David Kimberlin, co-director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.