US faces record surge of cases

Europe passed 10 million coronavirus infections, the United States topped nine million and France entered a new lockdown on Friday as the resurgent pandemic increasingly forced other countries to consider following suit, report agencies.

A record surge of coronavirus cases in the United States pushed hospitals closer to the brink of capacity and drove the number of infections reported on Friday to an ominous new daily world record of 100,000, four days before the US presidential election. The United States also documented its 9 millionth case to date on Friday, representing nearly 3 per cent of the population, with almost 229,000 dead since the outbreak of the pandemic early this year, according to a Reuters tally of publicly reported data.

With the country facing the final stretch of a tumultuous presidential campaign dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, US health authorities on Friday also confirmed that 100,233 more people had tested positive for COVID-19 over the past 24 hours.

Friday's tally set a new single-day record in US cases for the fifth time in the past 10 days, surpassing the previous peak of 91,248 new infections posted a day earlier.

It also represented the world's highest national daily toll during the pandemic, exceeding India's 24-hour record of 97,894 set in September.

The global confirmed cases of Covid-19 exceeded 46 million on Saturday, according to the latest tally from www.worldometers.info.

The data shows the Covid-19 cases reached 46,070,959 while 1,196,324 more fatalities recorded till this morning.

Europe is now recording 241,000 new cases a day -- compared to 15,000 at the start of July -- and represented roughly half of last week's global infections.

Some 14 European countries meanwhile registered a record number of hospitalisations linked to the virus this week. Brazil's COVID-19 cases surpassed 5,494,376, while its death toll rose to 158,969 after another 513 fatalities were reported.

Brazil registered 26,106 new cases in the last 24 hours, shows the data.

Brazil ranks second in the world in the number of deaths from the disease, only behind the United States, and third in the number of cases, after the United States and India.