The global death toll from COVID-19 has crossed one million, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, but the World Health Organization (WHO) says that number is probably an underestimate and the actual toll is likely to be much higher.

Some 1,000,555 people across the world have now died from the virus, data from JHU showed on Tuesday.

COVID-19 was first reported in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year when doctors began noticing people were getting seriously ill with a mysterious new form of pneumonia. Despite border closures and quarantines, the virus spread across the world and the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic in March.

“If anything, the numbers currently reported probably represent an underestimate of those individuals who have either contracted COVID-19 or died as a cause of it,” Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, told a briefing in Geneva on Monday.

“When you count anything, you can’t count it perfectly but I can assure you that the current numbers are likely an underestimate of the true toll of COVID,” he said.

The United States has reported the most deaths – 205,031 – followed by Brazil (142,058), India (95,542), Mexico (76,430) and the United Kingdom (42,090).

he death toll is likely to rise further as the outbreak continues to accelerate in many countries around the world including the US.

The number of new COVID-19 cases there has risen for two weeks in a row in 27 of the country’s 50 states, and the 316,000 recorded in the seven days ended September 27 was the highest in six weeks, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

SOURCE: ALJAZEERA