The pandemic’s grip on the world has yet to let go or at least slowly ease away from our lives. All signs of progress are cut short by occasional spikes in cases. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently concluded that its possible roughly one in 10 people around the globe may have been infected with the coronavirus.
What We Know:
- Michael Ryan, head of the health emergencies program at the World Health Organization, noted on Monday of the agency’s dramatic estimate which indicates about 10 percent of the world’s population could have contracted the virus.
- Boiling it down to specifics, 10 percent would amount to more than 760 million people on the planets over 7.5 billion population. That is more than 20 times the amount of actual confirmed cases in the world currently and with the other 90% of the population still being susceptible to the virus if precautions aren’t met.
- Ryan spoke, in a special session of the WHO’s executive board in Geneva, on the figures that have been collected that demonstrate variations between countries. He stated that we are headed in an uncertain and difficult period in the pandemic with this large estimate signaling everyone remains at high risk.
- According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the globe amount of coronavirus cases surpassed 35 million Monday, only a week after global deaths reached 1 million milestones.
- Speaking of milestones, a few European countries hit their own since Monday. Germany reported its case count overtaking 300,000, the United Kingdom has hit the half a million threshold at 500,000 cases, and Spain become the first European nation to break the 800,000 case mark.
- The president of the United States, Donald Trump, was recently infected with the coronavirus after notably downplaying the past couple of months. He joined the list of other previously infected world leaders such as Prime Minister Boris Johnson from the UK. Johnson, another who initially downplayed, had a fault in the country’s testing data system come to light when it was revealed that 16,000 coronavirus results did not show.
- “To be frank, I think that the slightly lower numbers that we’d seen didn’t really reflect where we thought that the disease was likely to go,” Johnson said. Despite discrepancies in testing, the British government launched a $300 million program on Monday to help people get back to work.
Coming back home to the United States, the president is seemingly recovering with his return to the White House on Monday. Roughly two-thirds of all 50 states have reports spikes within the past week, according to data by The Washington Post. The United States remains on top of the pandemic leaderboard with more than 7.4 million cases of coronavirus and over 210,000 deaths.
