Breaking: Coronavirus deaths surpass 200,000 worldwide

<!– Medical personnel wearing personal protective equipment to protect from the new coronavirus remove a body from the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center to refrigerated containers parked outside, Thursday, April 2, 2020 in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) –>

Medical personnel removes the body of a patient killed by Coronavirus (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The deadly Coronavirus pandemic has killed over 200,000 people in the world, according to figures from John Hopkins University.

The current death rate has been put at 200,697 according to the university’s COVID-19’s tally of deaths across the world.

As of 1:45 p.m. ET on Saturday, the university is reporting more than 2,865,938 confirmed cases globally.

It comes after the number of fatalities in the US passed 50,000, as Americans endure the world’s deadliest outbreak, BBC reports.

On 11 January, Chinese state media reported the first known death liked to the virus. More than 210 countries and territories have since reported cases.

The UK’s Department of Health announced today that more than 20,000 people have now died with coronavirus in UK hospitals.

Home secretary Priti Patel described the figure as a “tragic and terrible milestone” and said “the entire nation is grieving”.

As the UK’s daily data does not include people who die at home or in nursing homes, the true figure is certain to be higher.

France, which does include deaths in care homes in its statistics, said its toll had risen by 369 on Saturday.

There have been 22,614 virus deaths in France since the start of March, but the country’s health officials say the mortality rate in hospitals is falling, and the number of people in intensive care has dropped for the seventeenth consecutive day.

Earlier this week, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted upward trends in Covid-19 cases in Africa, Eastern Europe, Central America and South America.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that while most of the epidemics in Western Europe appeared to be stable or in decline, for many countries the disease was just getting started.