This number has doubled in just over a month, with more than a million new infections in the last week. In China, the United States and Portugal, partial lockdown is taking place.
Ten million cases of the new coronavirus were officially diagnosed worldwide on Sunday 28 June, according to a count carried out by Agence France-Presse. Among these cases, 498,779 deaths have been recorded, particularly in Europe, the continent most affected (2,637,546 cases and 195,975 deaths), as well as in the United States (2,510,323 cases, including 125,539 deaths), the country most affected.
The number of reported cases worldwide has doubled since mid-May and more than one million new cases have been recorded in the last six days alone. This compares with 94 days between the first case in China and the 1 million infections worldwide. The pandemic is now progressing fastest in Latin America, with more than 400 000 cases in the last seven days on the continent.
However, these figures reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the number of infected Americans has increased tenfold, to more than 20 million people, or 5 to 8 percent of the population.
In the United States, contagion is increasing in 30 of the 50 states, particularly in the largest and most populous states in the south and west: California, Texas and Florida.
Asia appears to be experiencing a resurgence in the number of daily cases, now driven by the sustained spread of the disease in India (528,859 cases, including 118,398 in the last seven days), Pakistan (202,955, 26,338 new cases) and Bangladesh (137,787, 25,481 new cases).
For the “first time in months”, Europe is experiencing an increase in the number of weekly cases, notably in eleven countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned, alerting about the capacity of health systems to cope with this rebound.
Russia reported 6 791 new cases of coronavirus infection on Sunday. The total number of infections now stands at 634 437, the third-highest in the world, behind the United States and Brazil.
Partial lockdown
These figures are prompting more and more countries or regions to decide on local reconfinement measures, such as Florida and Texas in the United States, the northern suburbs of Lisbon in Portugal, or two German cantons (whose “rapid” reaction was welcomed by the Director of the WHO Europe Branch, Hans Kluge).
On Sunday, China announced the confinement of nearly half a million people near the capital, Beijing, affected since mid-June by a Covid-19 bounce that the authorities still describe as “serious and complex”. The Asian country has largely contained the epidemic, but the emergence of some three hundred new cases in the city in the space of just over two weeks is fuelling fears of a second wave. The outbreak was detected in Xinfadi, a wholesale market in the south of the city that supplies most of the capital’s supermarkets and restaurants with fresh produce.
