Medical responders wheel an elderly patient into the emergency room at Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York. File/AP

Gulf Today Report

More than 70.52 million people have been reported be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 1,598,967 have died.

According to the reports on Sunday, the global death toll approached 1.6 million as the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine was set to begin leaving the company's Michigan factory on Sunday, ready to be injected into the arms of millions of the most vulnerable Americans.

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Doses will be shipped out in boxes containing dry ice that are capable of staying at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit), the frigid temperature needed to preserve the drug.

Image only for representation

With 295,786 deaths and over 15.9 million confirmed cases, the United States tops the list of twenty countries with the highest recorded infections and deaths in the world.

Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.

Russia confirmed 28,080 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours on Sunday, including 6,425 in Moscow, pushing the national tally to 2,653,928 since the pandemic began.

Authorities said 488 people had died overnight, taking the official death toll to 46,941.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 20,200 to 1,320,716, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Sunday.