- Coronavirus cases are continuing to multiply around the world at a dispiriting pace, with the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University showing more than 23.5 million infections since the pandemic began.
- However, the COVID-19 coronavirus has yet to completely cover the globe.
- There are more than a dozen nations that say they haven’t recorded any coronavirus cases yet.
The number of coronavirus cases around the world is continuing to climb, with the pandemic still raging unchecked around the globe as it pushes the number of reported infections to more than 23.5 million, along with more than 810,000 worldwide deaths. That’s according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University, which keeps a constantly updated tally of the pandemic that countries like the US and others are still struggling to fight. Meanwhile, big pharmaceutical companies are trying to bring any of a number of vaccine trials to fruition, while over the weekend President Trump raised eyebrows when he held a brief news conference to tout the FDA’s emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a treatment for patients hospitalized with the coronavirus.
The state of the coronavirus pandemic in the US is also still such that it’s casting a long shadow over pretty much all of our daily lives. Trump will make his response to the pandemic a showpiece of the Republican National Convention this week, while the fast-food chain Kentucky Friend Chicken said today that it’s decided to suspend its famous catchphrase — that its food is “finger-lickin’ good” — because health officials have been warning people not to touch their face, in addition to staying socially distanced from people outside your home and to wear a face mask in public. But don’t misunderstand. Just because this is how things are in the US right now, that doesn’t mean everybody else has it this bad or even almost this bad.
Believe it or not, there are actually more than a dozen countries that claim to be completely coronavirus-free at the moment. It’s a combination of everything from the fact that some of them are islands, and hard to get to, to the fact that some of them probably wouldn’t admit it even if coronavirus did actually infect anyone in their general population.
According to Business Insider, these are the countries that say they haven’t recorded a single COVID-19 infection yet:
- Samoa
- Marshall Islands
- Solomon Islands
- Vanuatu
- Tuvalu
- Tonga
- Kiribati
- Turkmenistan
- Federated States of Micronesia
- Nauru
- North Korea
- Palau
- Cook Islands
- Niue
In addition to most of these nations being islands and a bit remote, there also isn’t much in the way of travel to some that would serve to bring the virus into the country. North Korea definitely falls into the latter category. Not only that, but experts are suspicious about its claim that it has yet to see any coronavirus cases in the country — with some officials suspecting that COVID-19 may have found its way into the country in March, or even earlier.
