The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Monday that the world was seeing a plateauing in the number of coronavirus infections and fatalities, with declines in most regions including Europe and the Americas, the two worst-affected regions.

“But it’s an unacceptably high plateau, with more than 5.4 million reported COVID-19 cases and almost 90,000 deaths last week,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing.

The WHO also noted that the B.1.617 variant first identified in India was being classified as a variant of global concern.

“We classify it as a variant of concern at a global level,” Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on COVID-19, told a briefing. “There is some available information to suggest increased transmissibility.”