The Covid-19 pandemic has exceeded two million infections worldwide, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, amid a crisis world health officials say is “10 times deadlier” than 2009's Swine Flu outbreak.
The new milestone came on Monday evening with the latest update of the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, which put total infections globally at 2,019,320, with nearly 120,000 fatalities. As the disease and death tolls continue to soar, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that containment measures should not be relaxed prematurely, as the virus is still spreading rapidly.
“We know that in some countries, cases are doubling every three to four days,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a briefing in Geneva on Monday, noting that Covid-19 has been 10 times more deadly than the H1N1 pandemic. “However, while COVID-19 accelerates very fast, it decelerates much more slowly.”
The Swine Flu outbreak is estimated to have sickened between 700 million and 1.4 billion people around the globe, while the WHO confirmed only 1.6 million cases and 18,500 deaths linked to the virus through lab tests. Though the true extent of the pandemic was likely not captured in the official stats, the Covid-19 crisis has now surpassed the WHO’s fatality count by more than six times. Some 12,500 Americans were killed during the H1N1 outbreak, according to the CDC, a tally also now dwarfed by the coronavirus, which has killed more than 23,000 in the US to date.
The US remains the world’s top Covid-19 hotspot with over 682,000 cases, but US health officials say the country could soon see light at the end of the tunnel, with CDC Director Robert Redfield stating the US is now “nearing the peak” of its outbreak.
“You'll know when you're at the peak when the next day is actually less than the day before,” Redfield told NBC on Monday, though declined to offer any specific time frame for when states could lift a spate of travel bans and stay-at-home orders, saying only that it had to be a “gradual process.”
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose state has been hit hardest in the US epidemic, also suggested that the “worst is over” for the Empire State as long as residents “continue to be smart” and follow social distancing guidelines, adding “I believe we can start on the path to normalcy.”
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