The number of detected cases of coronavirus infection in the world has exceeded 140 million, follows from data from Johns Hopkins University.
So, as of Saturday evening, April 17, since the beginning of the pandemic, 140,262,569 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded.
The United States is still the leader in terms of quantity (31,600,684), followed by India (14,526,609) and Brazil (13,832,455).
In total, more than 3 million people became victims of the coronavirus, of which more than 566.5 thousand in the United States. Brazil is in second place (368.7 thousand), in third place is Mexico (211.6 thousand).
On April 16, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adanom Ghebreyesus said that over the past two months, experts have recorded an almost twofold increase in new cases of coronavirus in the world.
At the end of March, WHO published a report on the results of its experts’ trip to China to investigate the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Experts considered the laboratory origin of the coronavirus extremely unlikely. One of the most plausible versions is the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans from bats through an unknown intermediate animal.
An outbreak of COVID-19 disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus occurred in Wuhan, China at the end of December 2019, then the virus began to spread in other countries. On March 11, 2020, WHO characterized the spread of coronavirus in the world as a pandemic.