VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

The global COVID-19 cases swelled 80 percent in the past month due to the Delta variant of coronavirus, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said. quoting a World Health Organization (WHO) report.

"On July 30, 2021, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reported a 89 percent surge in global (COVID-19) cases in the past four weeks due to the Delta variant," she said in a video press conference streamed on the Presidential Secretariat's Youtube channel on Sunday.

Many countries particularly Southeast Asian states witnessed a significant rise in COVID-19 cases, she said.

Accordingly, the global mortality rate rose 10 percent compared to a week earlier, she informed.

"On July 19-25, 2021, WHO also recorded the number of deaths at 69,000, an increase of 21 percent compared to the previous week," he noted.

The WHO director general also drew attention to the wide COVID-19 vaccination gap between advanced economies and developing nations, she said.

"The proportion of vaccine recipients against population is 84.9 percent in Europe and 82.5 percent in North America, while it stands at 4.6 percent in Africa," she said.

Meanwhile, 21.7 percent of the Southeast Asian population have been vaccinated against the COVID-19., she said.

Just in Indonesia, the number of vaccinated people reached 67,761,337 or 24.49 percent of its population.

"Insya Allah (God willing), with the arrival of vaccines from various sources to Indonesia, we will be able to speed up the vaccination drive and curb the spread of COVID-19," she said.

On Sunday Indonesia received 3.5 million doses of Moderna vaccine from the US.

Indonesia is also expected to receive 620 thousand doses of AstraZeneca vaccine from the UK on Monday.

Overall, Indonesia has received 178,357,880 COVID-19 vaccine doses comprising . 144,700,280 doses in bulk form and 33,657,600 doses in finished form. (Antaranews)