India has second highest corona cases after US

ISLAMABAD: More than 200 million cases of COVID-19 have now been registered worldwide since the novel coronavirus emerged in China in December 2019.

According to international media reports, the US currently has the highest number of corona cases, followed by India and Brazil. Pakistan comes on 31st number in this regard. On the other hand, the US has the highest death toll followed by Brazil and India.

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.

In the United States, for example, the number of new cases has exploded by more than 820 percent, now standing at an average of 94,000 per day compared to 11,000 at the end of June. But the rise in the daily number of deaths in the US is much slower, climbing 105 percent to 430 over the same period.

In Britain, where as many as 47,000 new cases have been recorded every day for the past few weeks -- a 30-fold increase compared with May -- the number of deaths has increased more than ten-fold from six to over 80. Nevertheless, that is far below record levels seen in January, when Britain´s daily number of deaths shot to 1,250.

By contrast, the average daily number of infections in hard-hit Indonesia has fallen by 19 percent over the past week to 35,000, but the daily number of deaths is up eight percent at 1,700. The current wave in Indonesia is the worst since the outbreak of the pandemic and the country is now recording by far the most daily deaths worldwide.