Global COVID-19 cases top 12 million

The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

NEW YORK

Global confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 12,012,000 on Wednesday night, passing the 12 million mark, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

A total of 548,914 people worldwide have died from the disease, the data showed.

The United States suffered the most from the pandemic, with 3,054,695 cases and 132,299 fatalities, the tally showed.

ROME

Around 135 Bangladeshi passengers were rejected from getting off a plane in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport on Wednesday over COVID-19 concerns, local health official said.
Italy on Tuesday has suspended flights from Bangladesh due to a spike in COVID-19 cases in the Bangladeshi community in Rome caused by arrivals from their homeland.

The Bangladeshi nationals from the Bangladeshi capital city of Dhaka flew from the Qatari capital city of Doha, said Alessio D’Amato, head of the Lazio region’s Health Authority Crisis Unit.

WASHINGTON

U.S. formal notification of withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) is “dangerous to human life” as the world faces not only the COVID-19 threat but also the threat of future pandemics, a U.S. public health expert said Wednesday.

As global COVID-19 infections top 12 million, with a vaccine still not in sight, “withdrawal is counterintuitive at best and dangerous to human life at worst,” Amanda

Glassman, also executive vice president of the Center for Global Development think tank, told USA Today. “The U.S. Congress should immediately explore what power it has to prevent this from happening.”

WASHINGTON

Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute Dr. Ashish Jha criticized the U.S. move to officially withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, noting that its blame on WHO for not investigating the COVID-19 outbreak in China is “deeply disingenuous.”