Global COVID-19 tally reaches 6,699,358; US on top with 1,883,656 confirmed cases

Image courtesy: Reuters

New Delhi: Atleast 1,883,656 people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus with 108,664 fatalities, according to Friday's midnight numbers shown on the COVID-19 dashboard of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. However, there are 6,699,358 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 393,205 deaths, said the JHU website.

Though the number of new deaths has been curving downward, the coronavirus continues to circulate widely within the United States amid the move to partly reopen economies by several states. 

France`s coronavirus death toll today rose by 46, or 0.2%, to reach 29,111, which is the fifth-highest total in the world. The rate of increase is the same as Thursday, while the number of people hospitalized for COVID-19 disease continued its long-running decline, the French health ministry said in a statement.

In the United Kingdom, the reproduction number of COVID-19 remains between 0.7 and 0.9, government scientists said on Friday, but has increased in parts of England after lockdown restrictions were eased, said a Reuters report.

Although the R number for the UK as a whole reflects the same rate of transmission as given last week, in England alone it is slightly higher - estimated to be between 0.7 and 1. That could mean problems ahead for Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he bids to re-open the economy in phases while avoiding a second peak of infections.

Notably, lockdown in England has been eased more quickly than Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland, where powers over measures are devolved.

The number of COVID-19 cases in India, however, has been doubling every three weeks but the epidemic is not growing exponentially in the country and South Asia region, said the World Health Organization (WHO). "In South Asia, not just in India, but in Bangladesh and... Pakistan and other countries of South Asia with large dense populations, the disease has not exploded, but there is always the risk of that happening," Dr Mike Ryan, WHO`s top emergency expert, told a news conference in Geneva. 

Soumya Swaminathan, WHO`s chief scientist, noting India has a population of 1.3 billion, reportedly said that the 200,000 reported cases, "look big but for a country of this size it`s still modest".

WHO epidemiologist Dr Maria van Kerkhove, however, said that PCR tests can show a person with mild infection being positive for fragments of the virus 2-3 weeks after the onset of symptoms and those with severe cases "for much longer". "But we don’t know what that relates to in terms of infectiousness, if somebody can actually pass the virus," she was quoted by Reuters as saying.

Meanwhile, India's count of confirmed COVID-19 cases rose to 2.28 lakh today and the death toll crossed 6,500, while the number of states with four-digit or bigger tallies has doubled since May 1 when migrant movements began in special trains from big urban clusters to their villages. 

In its latest update on Friday morning, Union Health Ministry said the number of confirmed cases has risen to 2,26,770 and the death toll has grown to 6,348 now -- marking nearly six-fold jump in the case count and an over five-fold surge in the number of fatalities since May 1.

(With Agency Inputs)