The World Has Hit One Million Coronavirus Infections, Over 50,000 Deaths As Pandemic Explodes

The coronavirus worldwide crossed one million mark on Thursday as the pandemic exploded in the United States and the death toll continues to climb in Italy and Spain, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

The novel virus has killed more than 51,000 globally with the largest number of deaths in Italy, followed by Spain and the United States, the Baltimore university's Center for System Science and Engineering reported.

Half of the planet is currently living in some form of lockdown, the virus is continuing to spread rapidly, and to claim lives at an alarming pace.

It said more than 200,000 people had recovered from the disease, more than 75,000 of them in China where the virus was first recorded late last year.

The first 100,000 cases were reported in around 55 days and the first 500,000 in 76 days, according to a Reuters tally based on official records. Cases doubled to 1 million within the past eight days, Reuters' data showed.

As the pandemic has spread around the world, governments have closed factories and businesses, grounded airlines and ordered hundreds of millions of people to stay at home to try to slow the contagion.

The economic cost of the pandemic is getting starker by the day, with new figures showing that an extra 6.65 million Americans signed on for unemployment benefit last week, taking to 10 million the number of people who lost their jobs in the last two weeks of March.

And economists warned it was going to get worse.

"No words for this," said Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics.

World leaders have announced huge financial aid packages to deal with the crisis and the World Bank on Thursday approved a plan to roll out $160 billion in emergency cash over 15 months.