Global COVID-19 cases exceed 100 million
Tunisian medical staff get ready to enter a coronavirus patient area at the intensive care unit of the Ariana Abderrahmen Mami hospital in the city of Ariana near the Tunisian capital Tunis on Wednesday.
More than 100 million COVID-19 cases have been recorded worldwide as of Wednesday. Almost 1.3 percent of the world’s population has been infected and more than 2.1 million people have died.
One person has been infected every 7.7 seconds on average since the start of the year. Around 668,250 cases have been reported each day over the same period, and the global fatality rate stands at 2.15 percent.
The worst-affected countries — the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom — make up more than half all reported COVID-19 cases but represent 28 percent of the global population.
It took the world 11 months to record the first 50 million cases of the pandemic, compared to just three months for cases to double to 100 million.
Around 56 countries have begun vaccinating people for the coronavirus, administering at least 64 million doses. Israel leads the world on per capita vaccinations, inoculating 29 percent of its population with at least one dose.
The US, which passed 25 million confirmed coronavirus cases last weekend, remains the country with the largest outbreak and the largest death toll of over 420,000.
US president Joe Biden is seeking to turn around the fight against the coronavirus, which took a ferocious grip on the country during Donald Trump’s presidency when the risks were downplayed and officials gave mixed messages on mask-wearing other safety measures.
Biden said vaccinating the entire US population was a daunting challenge.
And the program inherited from the Trump administration “was in worse shape than we anticipated or expected,” the new president said.
“This is a war-time undertaking. It’s not hyperbole,” he said, announcing the US was buying an additional 200 million doses and will have enough to vaccinate 300 million Americans — virtually the entire population — by early fall.
In another day of grim milestones, more than 100,000 people have died in the UK after contracting the coronavirus, figures from the British government showed on Tuesday. Britain is the fifth country in the world to record 100,000 virus-related deaths, after the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico.
The health department said 100,162 people have died after testing positive, including 1,631 new deaths reported on Tuesday.
“It’s hard to compute the sorrow contained in that grim statistic,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at a televised news conference on Tuesday.
Johnson said it was “hard to compute” the loss felt by British families after his country became the first European country to surpass 100,000 COVID-19 deaths.
But he said his government, which faced criticism over its initial response to the outbreak did everything that it could to minimize suffering and mitigating loss of life.
Johnson’s government is accused by many scientists of waiting too long to impose a lockdown in March as infections were rising exponentially. Leading epidemiologists say acting a week sooner might have cut the death toll in half.
