Nidae KashmirThe World Health Organization says roughly one in 10 people around the world may have been infected with the coronavirus.
The head of the health emergency program at the World Health Organization, Michael Ryan, said Monday that the agency’s “best estimates” indicate 10 percent of the world’s population could have contracted the virus.
That estimate, which would amount to more than 760 million people, is more than 20 times the number of confirmed cases in the world and would still leave more than 90 percent of the population susceptible to the virus.
Speaking to a special session of the WHO’s 34-member executive board in Geneva, Ryan said the figures vary between countries but the estimate means “the vast majority of the world remains at risk,” adding that “we are now heading into a difficult period.”
The number of confirmed worldwide cases tallied by the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center surpassed 35 million Monday, a week after surpassing 1 million coronavirus deaths.
Several European nations hit their own pandemic milestones with Germany reporting Monday its total confirmed cases exceed 300,000, Britain recording 500,000 cases, and Spain becoming the first European country to surpass 800,000 total coronavirus cases.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought on Monday to play down failure in his country’s testing data system that did not initially show 16,000 coronavirus test results.
“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.
Also, Monday, Britain’s Cineworld, the second-largest movie theater chain in the world, announced it would temporarily close its British and U.S. theaters. Coronavirus lockdown orders and restrictions on group gatherings have badly hurt the movie industry. Cineworld said the move would affect 45,000 jobs.
To address broader job losses in the country’s economy, the British government on Monday launched a new $300 million program aimed at helping people get back to work.
In the United States, about two-thirds of U.S. states reported an increase in new coronavirus cases in the past week, mostly in the West and Midwest, according to data tracked by the Washington Post. The United States has recorded more than 7.4 million cases of coronavirus and nearly 210,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered schools in several coronavirus “hot spots” around the state to close beginning on Tuesday, including parts of the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
