Staff Correspondent: Dhaka, Sept-02,

The global Covid-19 caseload has now surpassed 218 million, as the ferocious second wave of the corona pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world amid mass inoculation efforts.

The total caseload and fatalities stand at 218, 327,987 and 4,541,140, respectively, as of Thursday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

So far, 5, 326,650, 944 vaccine doses have been administered across the globe.

The US, which is the world's worst-hit country in terms of both cases and deaths, has so far logged 39,388,909 cases. Besides, 642,004 people have lost their lives in the US to date, as per the JHU data.

The United States is surpassing an average of 160,000 new Covid-19 cases a day due to the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant.

Brazil currently has the world's second-highest pandemic death toll after the United States and the third-largest caseload after the United States and India.

The total caseload rose to 20,804,215 while the death toll stood at 581,150 as of Thursday morning.

India's Covid-19 tally rose to 32,810,845 on Wednesday, while the death toll from the virus mounted to 439,020.

Daily new infections have fallen sharply since their peak of more than 400,000 in May.

Situation in Bangladesh

Both the Covid-19 cases and fatalities in Bangladesh dropped further as the country logged 79 deaths and 3,062 new cases, respectively, in 24 hours till Tuesday morning. The case positivity rate also declined to 10.11 percent.

The fresh numbers pushed the country’s total fatalities to 26,274, while the cases reached 1,503,680, according to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS).

The country last saw 112 coronavirus-related deaths on June 29 and the upswing in the fatalities reached its peak on August 5 and 10 when 264 deaths were recorded.

The new cases were detected after testing 30,294 samples in the past 24 hours, which reduced the daily case positivity rate to 10.11 percent, said the DGHS.

However, the situation was much more catastrophic from June to the better part of August as the country experienced a surge of Covid-related caseloads and deaths during that time.

Between May and June this year, there was a 273% rise in monthly caseloads and 162% in fatalities. In July, there was a 150% increase in caseloads and a 170% rise in deaths compared to the previous month, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

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