COVID-19, Which Has Reached 10 Million Cases In The World, And Has Killed Half A Million People

JAKARTA - Positive cases of COVID-19 in the world have exceeded 10 million as of Sunday, June 28. According to Reuters, this respiratory disease has also killed nearly half a million people in the seven months of "circulation" on earth.

The World Health Organization or WHO says that figure is roughly double the number of severe influenza diseases recorded each year.

Several countries have reportedly experienced an increase in positive cases, and have made the lockdown policy re-enforced. This is predicted by experts, will be a recurring pattern in the coming months and even until 2021.

According to Reuters, North America, Latin America and Europe each account for around 25 percent of positive cases of COVID-19 globally. Asia and the Middle East have about 11 percent and 9 percent of cases, respectively.

So far, there have been more than 497,000 deaths from this respiratory disease. This number is the same as the number of deaths from influenza that are reported each year.

The first cases of COVID-19 were only confirmed on January 10, 2020 in Wuhan in China, before infections and deaths spiked in Europe, then the United States and Russia.

The pandemic has entered a new phase, with India and Brazil experiencing more than 10,000 new cases a day. The two countries even accounted for more than a third of all new cases in the past week.

Brazil reported a daily record of 54,700 new cases on June 19, 2020. Looking at this, researchers say the number of deaths in Latin America could rise to more than 380,000 by October 2020.

The number of new COVID-19 cases has continued to increase at a rate of between 1-2 percent a day in the past week. Countries such as China, New Zealand and Australia have experienced new outbreaks in the past month, although mostly as a result of local transmission.

In Beijing, where hundreds of new cases have been linked to the agricultural market, testing capacity has been increased to 300,000 per day.

Meanwhile in the United States (US), which has reported the most cases in the world with a total of more than 2.5 million cases, reportedly managed to slow the spread of the virus in May 2020.

In some countries with limited testing capacity, the number of cases represents a small proportion of total infections. About half of reported infections are known to have recovered.