The COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 565,000 people out of nearly 13 million registered cases worldwide, has been accelerating sharply since the start of this month, according to a count carried out by Agence Presse-France from official sources.
The three biggest daily worldwide increases in new cases were seen on Saturday (more than 230,000), Friday (more than 225,000) and Thursday (nearly 220,000).
Since July 1, nearly 2.5 million new cases have been officially declared, a record level since the outbreak was first reported in China in December last year.
Photo: Reuters
The number of declared cases worldwide has doubled in just a month-and-a-half. The US (3,247,782 cases), Brazil (1,839,850), India (849,553), Russia (727,162) and Peru (322,710) account for more than half of the global total.
Worldwide, a total of at least 12,736,737 infections, including 565,151 deaths, have been recorded.
Europe is the most-affected continent in terms of fatalities, with 202,396 out of 3,355,128 cases, while the hardest-hit country — the US — has registered 134,815 deaths.
Latin America and the Caribbean is the region where the disease is surging the most, with more than 76,000 new cases registered on Saturday, compared with just over 70,000 in the US and Canada, nearly 40,000 in Asia, 17,500 in Africa and 16,000 in Europe.
South Africa is now the ninth-most affected nation, according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard tracker.
It has 264,184 cases, including 3,971 deaths, accounting for more than 40 percent of all the reported cases in Africa.
More than 30 percent of its cases are in Gauteng Province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Africa’s 54 countries have reported 577,904 cases, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yesterday.
The continent’s confirmed cases are concentrated in three other countries: Egypt (81,158), Nigeria (31,987) and Algeria (18,712).
The number of actual cases in Africa is believed to be much higher, as the testing rate is very low in many countries.
The number of diagnosed cases worldwide still reflects only a fraction of the actual number of infections. Some nations test only severe cases, others use them primarily for tracing and many poor countries have limited testing capacity.
US President Donald Trump on Saturday appeared for the first time in public wearing a mask, as more than 66,000 new cases were recorded in the US, a new daily record, according to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard.
Trump wore a dark mask with the presidential seal as he walked through the corridors of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to meet wounded veterans.
Trump strode past reporters and did not stop to speak to them about what had become a hotly anticipated moment — would he have a change of heart on a practice recommended by the US government’s own medical experts?
“I’ve never been against masks, but I do believe they have a time and a place,” Trump said as he left the White House.
News reports last week said aides practically begged the president to relent and wear a mask in public — and let himself be photographed — as COVID-19 cases soared in some states and as Trump trailed former US vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, badly in polls ahead of the November election.
Trump has reportedly told aides that wearing a mask would make him look weak and he could not stomach the idea of letting the media photograph him in one.
Even on Saturday as he left the White House to head to Walter Reed, Trump made it sound like he would wear a mask only because he would be in a hospital.
“I think when you’re in a hospital, especially in that particular setting, where you’re talking to a lot of soldiers and people that, in some cases, just got off the operating tables, I think it’s a great thing to wear a mask,” Trump told reporters.
Additional reporting by AP
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