The world surpassed five million registered COVID-19 cases on Thursday, another grim milestone in a global pandemic full of them. Over 30 percent of the 5.02 million cases, 1.55 million, are in the U.S., according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The No. 2 country is Russia, with 318,000 reported cases. Overall, 328,462 people are reported to have died from the coronavirus, including 93,439 in the U.S. The actual numbers worldwide are almost certainly significantly higher.
It is an uneven picture globally and in the U.S., with cases and deaths declining in some countries or states and rising in others. But the pandemic is not waning overall. The World Health Organization said Wednesday that member countries had reported 106,000 new cases in the past 24 hours, the highest daily total since the outbreak began. "We still have a long way to go in this pandemic," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
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