Cumulative global COVID-19 cases surpassed 400 million on Tuesday, fueled by the highly transmissible omicron variant.
By 11 p.m. EST, the total number of global COVID-19 cases confirmed to date swelled to 400,514,564, a figure that has resulted in nearly 5.8 million virus-related fatalities worldwide, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally.
Meanwhile, nearly 87 million new cases have been confirmed within the past 28 days, and more than 15.1 million of those cases were diagnosed in the United States.
France and India are the next-highest nations in terms of surging COVID-19 diagnoses, with nearly 8.7 million and nearly 6.5 million new cases, respectively, confirmed within the same four-week period, according to the Johns Hopkins data.
According to The New York Times, it took more than a year for the world to reach 100 million confirmed infections, seven months to double that figure and now six months to double that figure again, with the last 100 million cases recorded within the past month alone.
Although daily COVID-19 case counts have begun to decline, there have been an average of more than 2.7 million new infections reported globally every day, the Times reported.
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