The Pandemic "Coronavirus"has killed 45,371 people in 202 countries of the world .Total infected people tallied as 912,565, Recovered 1,91,826 and New cases 66,314. The coronavirus death toll in Italy has climbed by 727 to 13,155, the Civil Protection Agency revealed today, a significantly smaller increase than seen on Tuesday and the lowest daily tally since March 26. However, the number of new cases rose more sharply than a day earlier, growing by 4,782 against a previous 4,053, bringing total infections since the outbreak began to 110,574. In Lombardy, the epicentre of the outbreak, the daily tallies of deaths and cases were both up compared with those of the day before, reversing the recent trend. Italy has registered more deaths than anywhere else in the world and accounts for around 30 per cent of all global fatalities from the virus.Six elderly nuns from the same Italian convent have died from coronavirus while another nine are in hospital after being infected.
Maria Annetta Ribet, 85, was the latest to die at a hospital in the commune of Tortona, in Italy's hard-hit north, on March 27.
An outbreak at Little Missionary Sisters of Charity was first reported on March 12, with 19 of the 40 nuns living there testing positive for coronavirus.
Spain's death toll from coronavirus has risen by a record amount for the second day in a row with total cases now over 100,000.
The country registered 864 new deaths between Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing the total from 8,189 to 9,053. The previous largest increase was 849, which occurred in the previous 24 hours.
The number of new infections rose by 7,719, jumping from 94,417 on Tuesday to 102,136 at the same time Wednesday. Spain is now rapidly catching up on Italy, which is the worst-affected country in the world with almost 12,500 deaths.
Italy was the first European country to go into a full lockdown on March 10, with data showing that the rate of new infections is now levelling off - meaning that deaths will begin to slow as the pressure on hospitals eases.
There are signs that the rate of infections in Spain is also starting to slow, falling from a 40 per cent rise in cases on March 13 - the day before a country-wide lockdown was brought in - to 8.2 per cent on Wednesday.
The rate of deaths also also falling, from a 43 per cent increase on March 13 to a 10.6 per cent increase on Wednesday.
The UK could already have had 1.8million coronavirus patients with one in every 37 people having caught the disease, according to scientists.
In Spain a staggering one in every seven people - 7.5million citizens - are predicted to have had the COVID-19 illness already, along with 10 per cent of Italians.
Researchers at Imperial College London, led by government adviser Professor Neil Ferguson, have studied coronavirus outbreaks across Europe to predict their true scales.
Professor Ferguson has been one of the foremost British experts since the outbreak began and it was his work that persuaded the Government to order a lockdown.
He and colleagues now suggest that an average of four per cent of people in 11 of the Europe's wealthiest countries have been infected - some 19million people.
They made the predictions as an alternative to 'highly unrepresentative' official figures, which are based largely on tests done in hospitals.
Many millions of people are believed to have caught the virus and recovered at home, putting the infection tolls in the UK, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Austria, Denmark, Germany and Norway considerably higher than the World Health Organization total of 366,000.Professor Ferguson and his colleagues wrote in their report: 'The ECDC [European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control] provides information on confirmed cases and deaths attributable to COVID-19.
'However, the case data are highly unrepresentative of the incidence of infections due to underreporting as well as systematic and country-specific changes in testing.
'We, therefore, use only deaths attributable to COVID-19 in our model; we do not use the ECDC case estimates at all.'As well as considering how many people have died with the coronavirus in each country, the Imperial team also looked at what types of lockdown measures each country has brought in and when they started them.
The stricter and the sooner they began, the smaller proportion of people are likely to have become infected.
The country with the lowest estimated infections was Norway, where only 0.41 per cent of its 5.5million people are thought to have caught the coronavirus (approximately 22,400 people).
In Germany the rate of infection was thought to be 0.72 per cent (577,000 people), according to the data which was estimated for March 28.
Besides Spain and Italy, which had a combined estimate of around 13.6million people infected, no other country's toll was higher than four per cent.
In Belgium it was thought to be 3.7 per cent (433,600 people); in Switzerland 3.2 per cent (269,000); Sweden 3.1 per cent (316,200); France 3 per cent (2.035million); UK 2.7 per cent (1.775m); Austria 1.1 per cent (97,400) and Denmark 1.1 per cent (64,500).
The official number of cases recorded in all 11 countries in the research is just 365,734, by comparison.
Writing in the paper, the team said: 'We estimate that there have been many more infections than are currently reported.
'The high level of under-ascertainment of infections that we estimate here is likely due to the focus on testing in hospital settings rather than in the community.
'Despite this, only a small minority of individuals in each country have been infected...
'Our estimates imply that the populations in Europe are not close to herd immunity (50-75%).'
The paper by Imperial College intended to work out how effective lockdowns and social distancing measures would be at protecting people.
It predicts that the lockdown in Italy - which has the highest death toll of any country in the world - may have saved 38,000 lives.
The study has not been reviewed by other scientists or published in a journal.
