The worldwide count of known COVID-19 infections climbed past 20 million on Monday It took six months for the world to reach 10 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus. It took just over six weeks for that number to double. The worldwide count of known COVID-19 infections climbed past 20 million on Monday, with more than half of them from just three countries: the US, India and Brazil, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University. The average number of new cases per day in the US has declined in recent weeks but is still running high at over 54,000, versus almost 59,000 in India and nearly 44,000 in Brazil.