The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic infected 905,279 people worldwide and increased the death toll to 45,371 till 11.45 pm (IST) on Wednesday even as the head of the United Nations has described this crisis as humanity's worst since World War II.


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The US has recorded the highest numbers of cases worldwide at 199,092 including 4,361 deaths. Italy has a total of 110,574 positive cases including 13,155 deaths, the highest fatalities globally. Spain followed Italy with 102,136 cases and 9,053 deaths.


Italy and Spain bore the brunt of the crisis as the grim tally hit another milestone even though half of the planet's population is already under some form of lockdown in a battle to halt contagion. Spain reported a record 864 deaths in 24 hours.


Since emerging in China in December 2019, COVID-19 has spread across the globe. US President Donald Trump has warned of a "very, very painful two weeks" as the United States registered its deadliest 24 hours of what he called a "plague".


In a scramble to halt the contagion, governments have shut schools, most shops, and ordered millions of people to work from home. Cancellations of key events on the global calendar have swept both the sports and cultural worlds, with the Edinburgh arts festival the latest to be scrapped.


For UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the extraordinary upheaval spurred by the virus presents a real danger to the relative peace the world has seen over the last few decades. The disease "represents a threat to everybody in the world and... An economic impact that will bring a recession that probably has no parallel in the recent past," he said. "The combination of the two facts and the risk that it contributes to enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict are things that make us believe that this is the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War."


With most business activity grinding to a halt for an undetermined period of time, scenes of economic desperation and unrest were emerging across the globe. In Italy, queues were lengthening at soup kitchens while some supermarkets were reportedly pillaged. The economic pain of lockdowns is especially acute in poorer nations. In Tunisia, several hundred protested a week-old lockdown that has disproportionately hit the poor.


Africa's biggest city Lagos was just into its second full day of lockdown on Wednesday -- but with some of the world's biggest slums, home to millions who live hand-to-mouth, containment will be a challenge. Wary of a collapse of the world's economy, the globe's leading central bankers have pumped billions of liquidity into the system.


Worst-hit Italy and Spain are leading a push for a shared debt instrument -- dubbed "coronabonds", but talk of shared debt is a red line for Germany and other northern countries. The economic cost of the crisis was still piling up as lockdowns remain at the forefront of official disease-stopping arsenals -- a strategy increasingly borne out by science.


The heads of three global agencies have warned of a potential worldwide food shortage if authorities fail to manage the ongoing coronavirus crisis properly. Many governments around the world have put their populations on lockdown to slow the spread of the virus but that has resulted in severe slow-downs in international trade and food supply chains.


Meanwhile, panic buying by people going into isolation has already demonstrated the fragility of supply chains as supermarket shelves emptied in many countries. "Uncertainty about food availability can spark a wave of export restrictions, creating a shortage on the global market," said the joint text signed by Qu Dongyu, head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Roberto Azevedo, director of the World Trade Organization (WTO).