WARSAW, March 12. /TASS/. The number of coronavirus cases in Poland over the past day increased by 18,775 people, the Ministry of Health announced on Friday.

At the end of last day, the department also reported 351 deaths and 13,944 recovered patients. In total, starting from March 4, 2020, when the first coronavirus case was detected in the republic, 1,868,297 people were infected with it, 46,724 died, 1,530,484 recovered. More than 10.5 mln tests for coronavirus have been done in Poland since the beginning of the pandemic.

All-time record for the number of cases was reported in Poland on November 7, when 27,875 new cases were found over a day. After that, the incidence curve went down and in early February rarely rose above 7,000 cases in 24 hours. Over the past three weeks, the spread of coronavirus has accelerated again. On Thursday, the largest number of new cases since November last year was announced - 21,045.

At the moment, there are about 19,100 patients with coronavirus in Polish hospitals, 1,982 of them are connected to ventilators. More than 299,000 people are in quarantine. At the moment, the country has a total of 27,500 beds for COVID-19 patients and 2,700 ventilators.

Vaccination against coronavirus began in Poland on December 27, 2020. In two and a half months, the country received more than 5.3 mln doses of vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna, as well as AstraZeneca. Over 4.3 mln doses have already been used. More than 2.8 mln people in Poland received the first dose of the drug, 1.5 mln people have already been vaccinated twice.

In late December 2019, Chinese officials informed 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.