Despite various measures been put in place by countries across the world to curb the spread of COVID-19 infection, the world is still faced with the challenge of curtailing the spread as more than 100 million people are confirmed to have been infected by the virus globally, according to data from Johns Hopkins University data on Wednesday.
A second wave coupled with highly infectious variants of the virus has seen the world doubled in three months, the first 50 million cases it recorded in 11 months.
Life has been far from normal since the virus emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan as economies, businesses, schools and families have been seriously hit across the world.
According to Johns Hopkins University, over 2.1m lives have been lost globally to this deadly virus, a figure some health experts seems not to agree with as many believed some might have died without being reported.
The worst affected countries are the United States, India, Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom which makes up more than half of the total reported COVID-19 cases.
The United States leads the world in the number of reported infections and fatalities with over 25m cases and 425,000 lives lost to the virus.
US President Joe Biden in an effort to curb the rising cases of COVID-19 infections on his first day in office signed an executive order to implement a national mask mandate on federal property which requires Americans to wear masks for 100 days and requires their use on federal property.
He also plans to get more people vaccinated in order to beat the deadly virus with more than 17.5 million doses said to have been administered across the country.
India is the second highest country hit by the pandemic with more than 10.6 million infections reported and over 153,000 lives lost to the virus.
Third is Brazil with a reported case of nearly 9m and second highest fatalities of 218 deaths, followed by Russia and the United Kingdom with a little over 3.7m confirmed cases each and over 69,000 and 100,000 deaths respectively.
Down to Africa, the continent has also been hit with the pandemic with nearly 3.5 million cases and over 86,000 deaths.
Even though various developers of vaccines have been able to come to the world’s rescue with 56 countries having begun vaccinating people for the coronavirus, administering at least 64 million doses, there seem to be concerns about delayed shipments of COVID-19 vaccines.
The head of the World Health Organization has also called for more equitable vaccine distribution between nations, as wealthier countries have been accused of “hoarding” doses.
