PARIS, June 13 (NNN-AGENCIE) — The coronavirus pandemic has killed 425,000 people since it emerged in China late last year, according to a tally of official sources at 0130 GMT on Saturday.
A total of 425,282 deaths have now been recorded from 7,632,517 cases.
Europe has registered 186,843 deaths from 2,363,538 cases, but the epidemic is progressing most rapidly in Latin America, where there have been a total of 76,343 deaths recorded from 1,569,938 cases.
The United States remains the country with the most recorded deaths at 114,643, ahead of Brazil which on Friday became the second worst-hit nation with 41,828 deaths. Britain is next with 41,481 deaths, followed by Italy (34,223) and France (29,374).
Brazil on Friday became the country with the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world with 41,828 fatalities, surpassing Britain, according to health ministry data.
The country recorded 909 deaths in the past 24 hours, with 828,810 confirmed infections among a population of 212 million.
Experts say the true number of cases could be 10 or 15 times higher.
Chile registered its worst daily figures for covonavirus fatalities on Friday, with 222 deaths and more than 6,700 new infections in the previous 24-hours, authorities said.
“The situation in our country continues to rise, above all in the
metropolitan region,” health ministry official Arturo Zuniga said.
Infections have risen steadily in the South American copper giant despite
the capital Santiago and its seven million people being placed on lockdown
four weeks ago.
On Friday, the government also put the cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar under mandatory quarantine, along with nearby rural towns.
The quarantine orders mean that nearly half of Chile’s 18 million population is under strict confinement.
Chile had registered more than 160,000 infections early Friday, with a total
2,870 deaths.
South Africa’s confirmed coronavirus infections have jumped by more than 10,000 in five days to 61,927 on Friday, official statistics showed.
Positive cases stood at 50,879 on Monday, just a week after the African continent’s worst-hit country further eased lockdown restrictions.
South Africa accounts for nearly 25 percent of the continent’s total cases, according to the World Health Organization.
The latest figures released by the health ministry showed that the virus has so far killed 1,354 people in the country since the first case was detected in March.
Between May 1 and June 1, 49,178 deaths were recorded, a decline of three percent on the same period last year, and similar to numbers for 2018, it said.
For the period March 1 to June 1, there were 178,706 deaths in France — a rise of 16 percent (25,200 deaths) from 2019 and of 12 percent (18,500 deaths) from 2018, said the institute.
The coronavirus has killed more than 29,300 people in France to date, some 10,300 of them in care homes. — NNN-AGENCIES
