Virus cases on sharp rise since start of July

PARIS: The coronavirus 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 July, according to a count carried out by AFP 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.

The number of declared cases worldwide has doubled in just a month and a half.

The United States (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 United States has registered 134,815 deaths.

President Donald Trump appeared on Saturday for the first time publicly wearing a mask, as more than 66,000 new cases were recorded in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins University, a new daily record.

Latin America and the Caribbean is the region where the disease is surging the most, with more than 76,000 new cases registered on July 11 (compared with just over 70,000 in the United States and Canada, nearly 40,000 in Asia, 17,500 in Africa and 16,000 in Europe).

On Friday, the World Health Organization said it was "still" possible to control the situation if "rapid action" was taken to deal with outbreaks.

The number of diagnosed cases still reflects only a fraction of the actual number of infections. Some countries test only severe cases, others use them primarily for tracing, and many poor countries have limited testing capacity.