Coronavirus cases in Europe top 30 million
More than 30 million coronavirus cases have been officially recorded in Europe, according to an AFP tally based on official health statistics at 0800 GMT on Friday.
The 52 nations, which include Russia, constitute the world’s worst affected zone in terms of the number of infections, with a total of 30,003,905.
Europe is followed by the United States and Canada, which had recorded 23,994,507 cases, Latin America and the Caribbean 16,989,628, Asia 14,485,588, the Middle East 4,323,966, Africa 3,170,837 and Oceania 31,443.
The worst affected countries in Europe were Russia with 3,520,531 cases and 64,495 deaths, Britain with 3,260,258 infections and 86,015 deaths, France (2,851,670 and 69,313) Turkey (2,364,801 and 23,495), Italy (2,336,279 and 80,848) and Spain (2,211,967 and 53,079).
Europe and North America are the regions with the highest number of daily cases.
Last week, each of these two regions registered an average of around 260,000 new cases per day.
The total number of new cases globally was around 730,000 per day.
Among the countries with fast-rising numbers of cases, Spain saw a jump of 168 percent in the past seven days compared to the previous week, with 193,545 new cases. It was followed by Portugal, where the toll was up 49 percent at 60,502 and Belgium, up 29 percent at 14,587.
Europe on December 17 became the first global region to pass half a million deaths.
On Friday at 0800 GMT, the continent had registered 646,022 deaths, ahead of Latin America and the Caribbean with 542,243 and the United States and Canada 406,049.
In total, more than 92 million cases of the coronavirus have been registered worldwide, including almost 2 million deaths, since the pandemic began in China in late 2019.
Since the start of the pandemic, the number of tests conducted has greatly increased while testing and reporting techniques have improved, leading to a rise in reported cases.
However the number of diagnosed cases is only a part of the real total of infections as a significant number of less serious or asymptomatic cases always remain undetected.
As a result of corrections by national authorities or late publication of data, the figures updated over the past 24 hours may not correspond exactly to the previous day’s tallies.
