The global number of new COVID-19 cases has been increasing for the last two months, as cases of the Delta variant have been reported in 148 countries, territories or areas, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a weekly overview report issued Wednesday.

With over 4.4 million new cases reported in the past week, the trend is largely attributed to increases in the Western Pacific Region and the Region of the Americas, which reported a rise of 14 percent and 8 percent respectively as compared to the previous week.

The cumulative number of COVID-19 cases reported globally is now over 206 million and the cumulative deaths are almost 4.4 million.

According to the WHO report, the regions with the highest weekly incidence rates of cases per 100,000 population remain the same as last week, namely the Region of the Americas and the European Region, with 147.4 and 121.6 new cases per 100,000 population, respectively.

At the country level, the WHO said, the highest numbers of new cases in the past week were reported by the United States, with 883,996 new cases or a 9 percent increase, followed by Iran (269,975 new cases, 9 percent increase), and India (258,121 new cases, 7 percent decrease).

Meanwhile, the highest numbers of new deaths in the past week were reported by Indonesia, Brazil and Russia, the WHO noted.