Global Coronavirus Death Toll Hits 700,000 – One Person Now Dies Every 15 seconds!

The total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases around the world is 18,317,520 – an increase of more than 1.7 million since last week.

THE global death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 700,000 on Wednesday, with the United States, Brazil, India and Mexico leading the rise in fatalities.

Nearly 5,900 people are dying every 24 hours from Covid-19 on average, according to calculations based on data from the past two weeks. That works out to 247 people per hour, or one person every 15 seconds!

The United States and Latin America are the new epicentres of the pandemic, both are struggling to curb the spread of the virus. The US government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, yesterday said states with high coronavirus case counts should reconsider imposing lockdown restrictions.

The coronavirus was initially slower to reach Latin America, which is home to about 640 million people, than much of the world. But officials have since struggled to control its spread because of the region’s poverty and densely packed cities.

Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine shows promising immune response, early data show.

A potential Covid-19 vaccine from the biotech company Novavax showed a promising immune response in a small, early trial, but not without a high rate of mostly mild side effects.

The results, published Tuesday, are the latest encouraging sign in the global effort to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, which has killed nearly 700,000 people around the world. But the Novavax data, much like results recently published by Moderna and AstraZeneca, are too preliminary to draw any conclusions about how well the vaccine might protect against Covid-19, experts said.

“It’s a small number of people in each arm, and the study wasn’t designed to demonstrate efficacy, which are the standard caveats for a Phase 1 trial,” said Edward Belongia, an epidemiologist and vaccine researcher at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin. “Having said that, it looks very promising – at least as promising if not more so than the other vaccines we’ve looked at.”