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so far, but barely eight percent of the population has had two shots.

Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine is the fifth to be approved after Oxford-AstraZeneca’s Covishield, the home developed Covaxin, Russia’s Sputnik V, and the US-made Moderna jab.

India remains the second worst-hit nation after the United States, with more than 32 million confirmed cases and 427,000 deaths. Because of under-reporting experts say the real toll is much higher.

Meanwhile, Australia saw a record daily number of new coronavirus cases this year yesterday, with the country’s most populous states of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland recording a total of 361 cases of the highly infectious Delta variant.

With about 15 million people in the three states, or 60% of Australia’s population, under a strict lockdown, the country also reported five coronavirus-related deaths, one of the highest this year.

With just over 36,000 COVID-19 cases and 937 deaths, Australia has avoided the high caseloads of other developed countries, but its vaccination figures are among the lowest, with only 20% of people aged over 16 fully vaccinated.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 4,275,868 people worldwide since the virus first emerged in late 2019, according to an AFP compilation of official data.

The pandemic is accelerating almost everwhere, most markedly in the US and Canada which saw a jump of 44 percent in average daily cases over the past week. Cases increased by 20 percent in Oceania, 11 percent in the Middle East, six percent in Asia, three percent in Europe and one percent in Africa.

This week the only region that did not record an uptick in cases was Latin America and the Caribbean, which saw daily infections decline by 13 percent over the previous week.

The average number of new daily cases globally increased by six percent over the week to 612,000, according to an AFP tally.

The pandemic has continued to gain ground since mid-June largely due to the highly contagious Delta variant now dominant in many countries.

The US saw the biggest number of new cases this week with 96,800, an increase of 44 percent. It was followed by India (40,600, an increase of five percent), and Indonesia (33,900, a drop of 20 percent).