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More than 2 million people worldwide died of COVID-19 on Friday.
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The world reached one million COVID-19 deaths just three months ago.
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The death toll is equivalent to the entire country of Slovenia.
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More than a year after the discovery of the first new coronavirus case, more than two million people worldwide died of COVID-19.
This is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Slovenia or the state of New Mexico. It is more than the entire population of Bahrain or the state of Nebraska.
The United States alone was responsible for more than 392,000 of those deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The world reached one million registered deaths just three months ago, at the end of September. Public health experts are concerned about the emergence and spread of more transmissible variants of the virus in countries like the United States, where there has been a rapid growth of cases during the winter months.
Read More: I was offered a covid vaccine, although I am young and healthy. See how I did it.
A new variant of the virus discovered in the UK last month was largely responsible for an increase in cases in southern England and has since been found in several states in the United States. Experts told Insider that the coronavirus running rampant probably helped it mutate.
“Virus mutations can only accumulate if the virus can be transmitted. Therefore, the longer we allow uncontrolled transmission to occur, the more likely the virus will have to adapt to human transmission,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, said Aylin Woodward of Insider.
Although virologists have not discovered that this mutation and others, like one found in South Africa, cause more deadly diseases, the ability to spread more quickly and infect more people can result in more deaths.
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