Global Covid-19 cases surpass 200M
More than 200 million cases of Covid-19 have been registered worldwide, since the novel coronavirus emerged in China in December 2019, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP at 0700 GMT on Thursday.
At least 200,065,905 cases have been officially recorded, but the actual number is believed to be even higher, since a large number of the less severe or asymptomatic cases remain undetected, despite intensified testing in many countries.
The number of infections is currently rising sharply, driven primarily by the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant, but the number of deaths is increasing at a slower rate, the data showed.
The global average daily number of new infections over the past seven days stands at more than 600,000, an increase of 68 percent over the seven-day average in mid-June. At the same time, the average number of daily deaths stands at 9,350, an increase of 20 percent compared with the beginning of July. The gap between the number of infections and the number of deaths is most noticeable in the countries currently hardest hit by the pandemic.
The novel coronavirus has killed more than 4.25 million people worldwide since the start of the pandemic, but the World Health Organization estimates that the overall toll could be two to three times higher than official records, due to the excess mortality that is directly and indirectly linked to Covid-19.
