The United States remains the worst-hit nation, with around 33 million cases and a death toll in excess of 587,000.
Next comes India, which has been experiencing a major spike in deaths, with 25.5 million infected and over 283,000 fatalities. Meanwhile, Brazil has confirmed over 15.8 million cases and a death toll of around 441,000.
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MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Brazil has increased by 82,039 to 15,894,094 within the past 24 hours, the national Ministry of Health said on late Thursday.
According to the ministry, the death toll has risen by 2,403 to 444,094 people within the same period of time.
More than 14.38 million patients have recovered since the start of the outbreak.
A day earlier, the country confirmed more than 79,000 new coronavirus cases, with 2,641 fatalities.
SAN SALVADOR (Sputnik) – The second batch of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus has arrived in Guatemala, an attaché of the Russian Embassy in the Latin American nation told Sputnik.
Guatemala received the first batch of Sputnik V on May 5.
"The plane with the long-awaited batch of vaccine has already landed," the diplomat said.
The emergency use of Sputnik V was greenlighted in Guatemala in late February. The country is also using the drugs developed by Moderna and AstraZeneca under the vaccination campaign.
The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To date, more than 165.09 million people have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, with over 3.42 million fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Guatemala has confirmed more than 243,000 COVID-19 cases so far, with about 8,000 fatalities.
Argentina imposed new coronavirus-related restrictions on Thursday, as the country faces the second wave of the deadly disease.
LONDON (Sputnik) - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Friday that the United Kingdom will work with the World Health Organization and other partners and nations to develop an advance international pathogen surveillance network to identify COVID-19 variants and emerging diseases.
"The world must never be caught unawares again by a virus spreading among us unchecked. We need to build a system of disease surveillance fit for the 21st century, with real-time data sharing and rapid genomic sequencing and response," Johnson was quoted as saying in a statement released by the Foreign Office.
The prime minister also claimed that the "Global Pandemic Radar," as the network was called, will ensure the early detection of new variants and emerging pathogens, so vaccines and treatments needed to stop them can be rapidly developed.
According to the official statement, as part of its rotatory presidency of the Group of Seven, the UK government is working with the WHO, NGOs, government centers of disease control and research organizations to take forward a report it commissioned from the Wellcome Trust, a London-based charitable foundation focused on health research, which sets out the mechanisms for a global pathogen surveillance system that can identify new variants of COVID-19 and detect other diseases before they become pandemics.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was also quoted as saying, "The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the vital need for a robust, modern system to keep the world ahead of emerging diseases through active monitoring at the community level, swift and accurate sequencing of new pathogens, and data-sharing across the globe."
The Global Pandemic Radar is expected to become fully operational before the end of 2021.
ANKARA (Sputnik) - The number of new COVID-19 cases recorded in Turkey over the past day was less than 10,000 for the first time since early March, the country's health ministry said on Thursday.
Turkey has been struggling with a spike in new cases in recent months. In mid-April, the country reported the highest daily increase since the beginning of the pandemic, 63,082, after which the situation began to gradually improve.
"Today, we have detected 9,385 new COVID-19 cases, 5,160,423 since the beginning of the pandemic," the ministry said in a statement, adding that the number of fatalities grew by 207 to 45,626.
The deteriorating health situation prompted the Turkish government to impose a total lockdown in the country from April 29 to May 17. Since then, the country has been gradually easing the imposed restrictions.
"In the week ending May 8, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 473,000, a decrease of 34,000 from the previous week's revised level", the department said in a statement. "This is the lowest level for this average since March 14, 2020 when it was 256,500".
"RDIF ... announces the approval of the Russian single-dose Sputnik Light vaccine against coronavirus by the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Nicaragua", the fund said in a press release.
"Nicaragua is already using Sputnik V vaccine to protect the population. Emergency use authorization of Sputnik Light will help increase the range of anti-COVID tools of the country and advance with the vaccination campaign", RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev said, as quoted in the press release.
"Over the past day, 9,232 coronavirus cases were confirmed across 84 Russian regions, including 1,330 cases (14.4 percent) without clinical symptoms", the response centre said, adding that the rate of increase grew to 0.19 percent.
On Tuesday I received my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
— The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) May 20, 2021
To all those working on the vaccine rollout - thank you for everything you’ve done and continue to do. pic.twitter.com/8QP6ao5fEb
