PARIS – Worldwide Covid-19 cases passed 150 million today, according to an AFP count, with numbers soaring recently due to a relentless second wave in India.
There have been 150.3 million cases declared since the coronavirus was first discovered in China in December 2019, based on AFP’s compilation of official data.
Worldwide, the number of daily infections has more than doubled since mid-February.
After the second wave from October to January, the figure had slowed to a little over 350,000 a day. But now, it is 821,000 daily.
In India, 2.5 million cases have been detected over the past seven days, an average of 357,000 a day – 30 times as many as in mid-February.
The explosion in infections has been blamed in part on a new virus variant, and also on failure to follow Covid-19 restrictions, said the World Health Organisation yesterday.
The countries with the highest caseloads are the United States (32.3 million), India (18.8 million) and Brazil (14.6 million).
Taking into account the population, the most-affected nations are Montenegro (15,457 cases per 100,000 residents), the Czech Republic (15,207 per 100,000) and Slovenia (11,513 per 100,000).
Largely due to India, Asia is the continent in which most of the new daily cases are appearing, and where the pandemic is accelerating the fastest, with fresh infections up 28% from the previous week.
Africa is the only other continent where new daily cases are increasing, but by only 3%.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, new daily cases have stabilised, and the figure is decreasing in Europe (down 18%) and the US (down 12%).
Since the discovery of the virus, more than a third of worldwide cases have been recorded in Europe, or over 50.2 million.
The US and Canada are the second-most-affected continent with 33.5 million, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (28.7 million) and Asia (25.6 million).
Almost 3.2 million deaths linked to Covid-19 have been recorded across the globe. – AFP, April 30, 2021
