World Health Organization reports new daily record in COVID-19 cases
The World Health Organization's COVID-19 dashboard showed Monday that a new one-day record high had been reached at 307,930 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. The WHO's complete figures for Sunday showed that 307,930 cases were confirmed to the U.N. health agency during the day, 19,870 higher than Saturday's tally.
Daily confirmed cases have only topped 300,000 once before, when 306,857 were recorded on September 6.
Within each week, the pattern of cases being reported to the WHO tends to spike toward Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and dip around Tuesday and Wednesday.
According to the WHO's figures, there have been more than 28,870,000 confirmed cases of the respiratory disease, while more than 921,800 people have lost their lives, including 5,537 on Sunday.
"Lives and livelihoods have been lost, the global economy is in recession and social and political fault lines have been exposed," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said via video-link Monday at the organization's European regional committee. "We are by no means out of the woods."
"The average daily number of cases in the region is now higher than it was during the first peak in March," he said, citing the record 48,921 cases confirmed in Europe on Sunday.
A total of 132,464 cases were confirmed in the WHO's Americas region on Sunday, followed by 101,119 in southeast Asia.
There were also 14,827 cases reported in the eastern Mediterranean, 5,958 in the western Pacific and 4,641 in Africa.
"Fortunately, the number of deaths appears to be remaining at a relatively low level — for now," said Tedros.
"But every death is a tragedy, and there can be no room for complacency. If we do not keep transmission in check, more people will lose their lives, and there is the real risk of re-introducing so-called lockdown measures that have been so costly."