World coronavirus cases hit 100 million, doubling under 3 months

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases around the world has surpassed 100 million, a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed.

The milestone was reached on Tuesday, almost exactly one year after the United States confirmed its first case of the coronavirus, and a little over a year since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China.

The figure has doubled in less than three months since reaching 50 million in early November. The death toll from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has already exceeded 2.1 million around the globe.

While some countries are now in the midst of distributing coronavirus vaccines, it remains uncertain when the pandemic will be subdued and economic activities will return to normal. By country, the US alone has reported over 25 million coronavirus cases with some 423,000 deaths, making it the hardest-hit nation in the world.

Newly-inaugurated President Joe Biden pledged to ramp up the United States’s struggling vaccine programme.

“This is a war-time undertaking. It’s not hyperbole,” he said, announcing the US was buying an additional 200 million doses and will have enough to vaccinate 300 million Americans - virtually the entire population - by early fall.

In terms of the number of Covid-19 cases, India has reported the second-highest total of about 10.6 million cases, followed by Brazil with nearly 9 million.