The National Institutes of Health defines a pandemic as “an epidemic of disease, or other health condition, that occurs over a widespread area (multiple countries or continents) and usually affects a sizable part of the population.”
So are we really in the clear?
Globally, there have been about 612 million cases of coronavirus. The number of new daily cases peaked in January for many countries, including the U.S. (806,987), France (366,554) and India (311,982), according to Our World in Data, an international organization of scientists.
We’ve come a long way since then – on Saturday, there were about 493,000 cases worldwide – but there are still thousands of cases being detected every day, and many estimates could be off, as many cases are going unreported.
From Aug. 16 to Sept. 17, there were 19.4 million new cases worldwide, with some of the most significant increases happening in Japan (29%), Taiwan (20%) and Hong Kong (19%). The U.S. had a 3% increase in cases during that time period, equivalent to 2.5 million incidents.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member