Global coronavirus infections pass 20 million

PARIS: More than 20 million coronavirus cases have been now been registered across the world, over half in the Americas, according to an AFP tally of official sources at 2215 GMT on Monday.

At least 20,002,577 cases and 733,842 deaths have now been reported. More than four out of 10 coronavirus cases have been in the United States and Brazil, the two most affected countries in the world.

While the US has logged 5,075,678 cases and 163,282 deaths, Brazil has recorded 3,057,470 infections and 101,752 deaths.

The pace of the pandemic appears to be stabilising across the world with an additional one million cases detected roughly every four days since mid-July.

It took 94 days for one million infections to be registered, after the announcement of the first official case in China. Eighty-six days later, on 28 June, the 10 million barrier was broken. The number of known infections has since doubled in a month and a half.

Latin America and the Caribbean, the hardest-hit region with 5,601,470 cases and 221,281 deaths, continues to experience rapid spread with 576,583 new infections reported in the last seven days.

It is followed by Asia (495,663), Canada and the US (379,017), Europe (153,879), Africa (89,644), Middle East (74,588) and Oceania (3,372).

Canada and the United States make up the second hardest-hit region overall, having recorded 5,195,417 cases and 172,300 deaths, ahead of Asia (3,493,026 cases, 72,486 deaths), Europe (3,374,166 cases, 213,484 deaths) and the Middle East (1,257,417 cases, 30,363 deaths).

Africa (1,057,730 infections, 23,582 deaths), which is the least-affected continent after Oceania (23,351, 346), has recorded more than half of its cases in South Africa.

India is the country with the most new infections over the last week (402,287), ahead of the United States (376,471), which on Sunday passed the five million mark of officially reported cases. Brazil (301,745), Colombia (69,830) and Peru (49,174) are the next most affected nations.

The figure for the number of infections reflects only a fraction of the actual number of cases, as many countries use the tests only for tracing or do not have sufficient resources to carry out widespread testing.