Nearly half of all COVID-19 cases globally can be found in the Americas and the numbers continue to climb, the World Health Organization's regional director for the Americas, Carissa Etienne, said on Wednesday.
As of June 23, there have been more than 4.5 million COVID-19 cases and 226,000 deaths reported in the Americas, she said in a virtual briefing from Washington.
In Latin America and the Caribbean alone, cases have tripled from 690,000 one month ago to 2 million.
There is now widespread transmission in Central America and in South America, as of this weekend, Brazil surpassed 1 million COVID-19 cases, joining the United States as the only other country in the world with cases in the seven digits.