COVID-19 cases exceed 127 million worldwide

(REUTERS) – The global total number of COVID-19 cases continues to rise, and reached 127,877,462 as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The global total COVID-19 relevant death toll topped 2,796,561, according to data from the WHO.

The United States remained the worst-hit country worldwide, followed by Brazil and India.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States surpassed 30.45 million on Wednesday, with the death toll exceeding 552,000, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Brazil reported a total of 12,748,747 COVID-19 infections and logged 321,515 COVID-19 deaths as of Wednesday, according to the country’s Ministry of Health.

A patient was identified for the first time in Brazil with a coronavirus variant similar to the one first detected in South Africa, and it could also be a mutation of the variant first seen in Brazil’s Amazonas state, local authorities said.

This new variant was detected in a patient hospitalized in the city of Sorocaba, 97 kilometres west of São Paulo.

India’s COVID-19 tally rose to 12,221,665 on Thursday as 72,330 new cases were reported from across the country, according to the latest figures released by the federal health ministry.

Four hundred and fifty-nine deaths in the country since Wednesday morning took the death toll to 162,927.

Both the number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths in 24 hours in India are the highest this year so far.

In January, the number of daily cases in the country had come down to below 10,000. As many as 9,102 new cases were reported on Jan. 25-26, which was the lowest in the previous 237 days. Prior to that, the lowest number of daily new cases was 9,304 registered on June 4, 2020.