The world has officially recorded 100 million cases of COVID-19.
Just over a year on since the World Health Organization was notified of the then-mysterious illness, Johns Hopkins University reports that the globe has crossed the grim 100 million case milestone.
Over the last week, roughly 600,000 cases were recorded each day. Countries have struggled to get a handle on two new, more transmissible strains of the virus originating in Britain and South Africa last last year.
More than a quarter of the world's cases (25,362,794) have been recorded in the United States, followed by India with 10,676,838. Brazil, Russia and the United Kingdom round out the top five.
The United States has also reported 423,010 of the 2,149,818 deaths globally from the illness, while Brazil, India, Mexico, and the United Kingdom have each recorded more than 100,000 deaths.
New Zealand has recorded 2290 cases of the respiratory illness, with the majority recently being detected in managed isolation and quarantine facilities. Community transmission of the virus hasn't been recorded in Aotearoa for months, but on Sunday it was revealed a woman in Northland had tested positive after leaving managed isolation days earlier.
The focus for countries is now on securing and rolling out vaccines against COVID-19. Several have become available, including from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
Israel is currently leading the charge on the vaccination front, with more than 30 percent of its population having received at least one dose of a vaccine.
