The number of coronavirus cases worldwide has passed 100,000, and has caused the deaths of more than 3,400 people.
The total number of cases now stands at 100,055 as of 8 a.m. ET on Friday, according to data compiled by John Hopkins. The majority of the cases are in mainland China, followed by South Korea, Iran and Italy. In the United States, there are at least 233 cases and 14 deaths, according to John Hopkins.
On Thursday, the World Health Organization called on all nations to “pull out all the stops” to fight the COVID-19 outbreak as it continues to spread across dozens of countries.
World health officials said Tuesday the mortality rate for COVID-19 is 3.4% globally, higher than previous estimates of about 2%.
Health officials have said the respiratory disease is capable of spreading through human-to-human contact, droplets carried through sneezing and coughing and germs left on inanimate objects.
The COVID-19 epidemic has not yet met world health officials’ designation of a global pandemic that spreads far and wide throughout the world.
Tedros has said WHO hasn’t declared a pandemic in part because most cases of COVID-19 were still traced to known contacts or clusters of cases, and there wasn’t any “evidence as yet that the virus is spreading freely in communities.”
