40% of world's total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases are in US and Brazil: Report

Nearly 40 per cent of all reported Covid-19 cases are in the United States and Brazil, the two worst-hit countries.

In the United States, metrics on new cases, deaths, hospitalizations and test positivity rates are all declining, but there are emerging hotspots in the Midwest.

On the other hand, just over six months after registering its first case of the new coronavirus, Brazil crossed the grim threshold of 120,000 people killed by Covid-19, with no end in sight to the crisis.

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The country of 212 million people has now registered 120,262 deaths from the virus and 3,846,153 infections, the health ministry said in its daily update.

Brazil is just the second country to surpass a death toll of 120,000 in the pandemic, after the United States, where the number killed is now more than 182,000.

The global pace of new infections has steadied a little. It has taken about three weeks for the caseload to jump by 5 million cases to 25 million. That compared with the 19, 24 and 39 days it took, respectively, to add 5 million cases to the 20 million, 15 million and 10 million marks.

The rate of new daily cases has slowed to around 1.2% over August so far. That compared with 1.7% in July, 1.8% in June, 2.1% in May, 4.6% in April and 7.7% in March.

Health experts stress that official data almost certainly underreports both infections and deaths, particularly in countries with limited testing capacity.

While COVID-19's trajectory still falls far short of the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected an estimated 500 million people, killing at least 10% of patients, experts worry the available data is underplaying the true impact of the pandemic.

(With inputs from agencies)