GENEVA, April 7. /TASS/. More than 31,000 new coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the past day in North and South America, which is by 700 cases more than in Europe, as follows from the World Health Organization’s (WHO) daily bulletin issued on Tuesday.

In all, as many as 1,279,722 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus were registered worldwide as of 2 p.m. Geneva time on April 7, or up by 68,766 on the previous day. The global morbidity rate has visibly decreased compared with Monday’s daily growth of 77,000 new cases. However the death toll demonstrated an upwards dynamics: 5,022 fatalities reported on Tuesday against 4,810 on Monday. The overall death toll since the pandemic outbreak has reached 72,616.

Europe still accounts for the majority of confirmed cases and fatalities — 686,338. In the past 24 hours, the number of cases grew by 30,999.

The number confirmed COVID-2019 cases in South and North America reached 384,242, with 31,690 cases confirmed in the past day alone.

The Asia Pacific region, which includes China, South Korea and Japan, has 113,641 cases as of April 7, which is up by 1,119 cases on the previous day.

The biggest number of coronavirus cases were reported from the United States (307,318), Spain (135,032), Italy (132,547), Germany (99,225), China (83,071), France (73,488), Iran (60,500), the United Kingdom (51,612), Turkey (30,217), Switzerland (21,574), Belgium (20,814), and the Netherlands (18,803).

WHO’s data originate from official sources.

A pneumonia outbreak caused by the COVID-19 virus (previously known as 2019-nCoV) was reported in China’s city of Wuhan, a large trade and industrial center with a population of 11 million, in late December 2019. Since then, cases of the new coronavirus have been reported from nearly all parts of the globe. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.