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A stadium converted into a vaccination center in Berlin. (Reuters/Yonhap News)

On Dec. 27, the global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose above 80 million. That means the disease has spread to at least one of every 100 people around the world in the year since the pandemic began.

According to COVID-19 statistics provided by Johns Hopkins University, there were 80.33 million cases and 1.75 million fatalities as of Dec. 27. In effect, 1.02% of the global population has contracted COVID-19, assuming a global population of 7,834,870,000 people, as estimated by Worldometer.

Nearly a year has passed since the World Health Organization was informed of an unidentified form of pneumonia on Dec. 31, 2019.

With 18.98 million cases, the US accounted for nearly a quarter of the total. India came in second, with 10.16 million cases. The countries with more than 2 million cases are Brazil (7.46 million), Russia (2.99 million), France (2.6 million), the UK (2.26 million), Turkey (2.13 million) and Italy (2.03 million). Countries with more than 1 million cases include Spain (1.85 million), Germany (1.64 million), Colombia (1.58 million), Argentina (1.57 million) and Mexico (1.37 million).

Officially, China only has 95,000 cases of COVID-19, despite being the world’s most populated country, with a population of 1.4 billion people, as well as the country where COVID-19 was first reported. South Korea has identified 56,872 cases of the disease.

The rate of occurrence of COVID-19 cases has been gradually increasing. Initially, it took 30-40 days for 10 million cases to occur. But once the tally reached 50 million, the world has been seeing 10 million cases every 15 days.

There are growing concerns that the coronavirus is becoming more infectious, with variants being reported first in the UK and South Africa and then in Nigeria. Researchers say that the variants in the UK and South Africa are 50-70% more transmissible than the original coronavirus, but that the variant in Nigeria is not.

The virus variants that have appeared in these three countries have spread to at least 13 other countries, including France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Singapore and Lebanon, Al Jazeera reported.

As a result, South Korea has banned flights from the UK through the end of the year, while Japan has decided to temporarily block all non-resident foreigners from entering the country, with the measure lasting through the end of January 2021. More than 40 countries have banned travel from the UK.

By Choi Hyun-june and Kim So-youn, staff reporters

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