GENEVA, November 12. /TASS/. More than 579,000 new confirmed cases of novel coronavirus have been recorded globally in the past day, bringing the total number of infections to 51.84 million, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in its daily bulletin on Thursday.

According to the WHO updates, the coronavirus-related deaths increased by over 9,600 to exceed 1.28 million.

As of 18:41 Moscow time on November 12, as many as 51,848,261 coronavirus cases and 1,280,868 coronavirus-related deaths were registered across the globe. The number of confirmed cases grew by 579,253 in the past 24 hours and the number of fatalities increased by 9,668.

Up to now, a daily surge of 613,958 cases recorded on November 7 is the record high number of infections. The WHO statistics are based only on officially confirmed data provided by countries.

Europe accounts for more than 48% of daily COVID-19 cases, amounting to 277,555. South and North America go second (197,747 cases) followed by South East Asia (57,223).

The WHO says that as of November 12, the highest amount of COVID-19 cases has been recorded in the United States (10,124,555), followed by India (8,863,916), Brazil (5,700,044), Russia (1,858,568), France (1,829,688), Spain (1,417,709), Argentina (1,262,476), the UK (1,256,729), Colombia (1,156,675), Italy (1,028,424), Mexico (978,531) and Peru (925,431).

In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia. On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.