Geneva, January 27 (RHC)-- The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide has passed 100 million, according to data from Johns Hopkins University data -- just over a year since the first cases of the then ‘mysterious’ new illness were reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

During the past 12 months, the pandemic has forced governments to order shutdowns, curfews, travel bans and other public health restrictions to try and stem the spread of infections.  Economies have been hard hit and inequalities of all types have been exacerbated.

More than 2.1 million people around the world have died from COVID-19, and more than 55 million people have recovered from the disease.

Despite the development of more effective treatments for the coronavirus and the roll out of vaccines across dozens of countries, mutant strains of the virus recently detected in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil have created uncertainty about when the pandemic will end.

“The world has crossed 100 million reported cases,” Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said on Tuesday.  “A year ago, the novel coronavirus was barely making headlines. Where do we want to be a year from now?  Let’s aim for robust vaccination coverage worldwide, and a transition from community mitigation to case-based management,” she tweeted.

The United States has recorded the most cases of any country to date at more than 25.3 million --  approximately one-quarter of the global total.  With more than 424,000 deaths recorded, the U.S. also has the highest death toll in the world.

U.S. President Joe Biden, who officially took office last week and has promised to get surging infection rates under control, said in a news conference that his administration plans to buy 200 million more vaccine doses.  The end goal is to beat COVID-19, and the way we do that is to get more people vaccinated,” Biden told reporters.