More than 250 million COVID-19 infections have been recorded worldwide since the start of the pandemic, according to an AFP count compiled from official reports on Tuesday.
Globally, more than five million deaths from COVID-19 have been recorded so far, but the vast majority of those infected have recovered. Some, however, have continued to experience symptoms weeks or even months later.
The figures are based on daily reports provided by health authorities in each country.
A significant proportion of the less severe or asymptomatic cases remain undetected despite increased screening in many countries since the start of the pandemic. In addition, testing policies differ from country to country.
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Europe is the region with the highest number of infections, registering more than 76 million COVID-19 cases since the start of the outbreak in China in December 2019.
Asia is the second most affected with 56,201,653 cases, followed by the United States and Canada (48,290,522 infections) and Latin America and the Caribbean (46,107,131).
The number of new cases around the world has been slowly increasing over the past few weeks.
Nearly 449,000 new daily infections have been recorded on average over the past seven days, against just over 400,000 in mid-October.
Of the new infections recorded worldwide, more than 60% are in Europe, which has seen an average of 279,000 cases a day over the past seven days.
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