Global Covid-19 cases top 20 million

Worldwide infections double in just six weeks

The number of coronavirus cases has topped 20 million, more than half of them from the United States, India and Brazil.

Health officials believe the actual number is much higher than that tally kept by Johns Hopkins University, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of those who are infected have no symptoms.

It took six months or so to get to 10 million cases after the virus first appeared in central China late last year. It took just over six weeks for that number to double.

An AP analysis of data through Aug 9 showed that the US, India and Brazil together accounted for nearly two-thirds of all reported infections since the world hit 15 million coronavirus cases on July 22.

The number of new cases has continued to rise in India, hitting a rolling seven-day average of 58,768. In the US, which has more than five million cases, the average has decreased since July 22nd, but remains high at 53,813 new cases a day.

In the 45 days that it took reported infections to double to 20 million, the number of reported virus deaths climbed to 736,191 from 499,506, according to the Johns Hopkins count.

That is 236,685 new deaths, an average of more than 5,200 a day.

About one-fifth of reported deaths, or more than 163,000, have been in the US, the highest in the world.

Caseloads are still rising quickly in many other countries, including Indonesia and Japan.

In Mexico, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and President Donald Trump, seldom wears a mask and has resisted calls for strict lockdowns, saying Mexicans should be convinced to observe social distancing, not forced to do so by police.

With nearly 500,000 cases and more than 50,300 deaths, Mexico has struggled with how to curb outbreaks given that just over half its people work off the books with no benefits or insurance.

A full lockdown would prove too costly for people with little savings and tenuous daily incomes, said Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the president’s point man on the epidemic.

He noted that “we do not want a solution that would be more costly than the disease itself”.

India reported 53,601 new cases yesterday as its count of total infections neared 2.3 million.

Its reported case fatality rate, of 2%, is much lower than in the US and Brazil.

In Japan, where outbreaks have been widening as officials urge people to consider this year’s summer holidays “special” and stay home, the positivity rate of tests in Tokyo, the worst hit region, has been climbing but remains at 7%.

The pandemic has waxed and waned in many regions, with the United Kingdom and Spain seeing new outbreaks after the worst of the early waves of cases paralysed much of Europe.

Australia was preparing to reopen travel with New Zealand, which has had no confirmed locally transmitted cases in more than 100 days, when fresh clusters of coronavirus cases popped up in Melbourne and the surrounding region. — AP