Shawdesh Desk:

The overall global number of Covid-19 cases is approaching 253 million amid spike in infections in several countries including Western European ones.

According to Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the total case count mounted to 253, 294,186 while the death toll from the virus reached 5,100,195 as of Monday morning.

The US has recorded 47,074,080 cases to date and more than 763,092 people have died so far from the virus in the country, as per the university data.

Brazil, which has been experiencing a new wave of cases since January, registered 21,957,967 cases as of Sunday, while its Covid death toll rose to 611,283.

India’s Covid-19 tally rose to 34,437,307 on Sunday, as 11,271 new cases were registered during the past 24 hours across the country, showed the federal health ministry’s latest data.

Besides, 285 deaths due to the pandemic since Saturday morning took the total death toll to 463,530.

Russia recorded 8,918,926 cases with fatalities of 250,609 so far.

For two months now, a stubborn wave of virus infections has ripped mercilessly through several countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where vaccination rates are much lower than elsewhere on the continent, reports AP.

While medical workers pleaded for tough restrictions or even lockdowns, leaders let the virus rage unimpeded for weeks.

“I don’t believe in measures. I don’t believe in the same measures that existed before the vaccines,” Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said last month as the Balkan nation sustained some of its worst daily death tolls of the pandemic. “Why do we have vaccines then?”

A World Health Organization official declared earlier this month that Europe is again at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. While several Western European countries are seeing spikes in infections, it is nations to the East that are driving fatalities.

Romania, Bulgaria and the Balkan states recorded some of the highest per-capita death rates in the world in the first week of November, according to the WHO.