With more than a dozen countries confirming a sudden surge in fresh Covid-19 cases, particularly driven by the new variant Omicron, global infection numbers have hit a record high over the last one week. Since the Omicron variant has overtaken the previously dominant Delta variant in most of the countries, the world has seen at least 9,00,000 cases newly detected daily on average between Dec 23 and 31. A number of countries posted all-time highs during the last 24 hours– the New Year Eve– including Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, the United States and several nations in Europe.