COVID-19 death toll exceed 700,000, one person dies every 15 seconds on average

The global death toll from COVID-19 surpassed 700,000 on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally, 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 Reuters calculations based on data from the past two weeks.

That equates to 247 people per hour, or one person every 15 seconds.The United States and Latin America are the new epicenters of the pandemic and both are struggling to curb the spread of the virus.

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.

More than 100 million people across Latin America and the Caribbean live in slums, according to the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Many have jobs in the informal sector with little in the way of a social safety net and have continued to work throughout the pandemic.

The United States, home to around 330 million people, has also been battered by the virus despite being one of the richest nations in the world.

The U.S. government's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Monday said states with high coronavirus case counts should reconsider imposing lockdown restrictions, emphasizing the need to get cases to a low baseline before the fall flu season.

Even in parts of the world that had appeared to have curbed the spread of the virus, countries have recently seen single-day records in new cases

Signaling the battle is far from over. Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Bolivia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Bulgaria, Belgium, Uzbekistan and Israel all recently had record increases in cases.

Meanwhile, Zydus Cadila today said its plasmid DNA vaccine to prevent COVID-19, ZyCoV-D, was found to be safe and well tolerated in the Phase I clinical trial.

The company will now commence Phase II clinical trials from the 6th of August, 2020

The phase I trial of another indigenously covid vaccine developed by Bharat Biotech, in collaboration with ICMR, has also been completed.

Zydus Cadila said that the doses of the vaccine administered to healthy volunteers in the Phase I clinical trial, which began on 15th July 2020, has been well tolerated.

Previously, the vaccine was found to be safe, immunogenic and well tolerated in the pre-clinical toxicity studies.