YEREVAN, July 2. /TASS/. Coronavirus cases in Armenia grew by 593 in the past twenty-four hours compared to 523 a day earlier, the republic’s Health Ministry reported on Thursday.

"In the past twenty-four hours, 593 new coronavirus cases were identified and 473 patients recovered from the illness. To date, 15,036 patients have recovered from the disease while the total number of the infected stands at 26,658," the ministry said in a statement.

Six coronavirus patients died at Armenian hospitals in the past twenty-four hours, bringing fatalities to 459 since the start of the pandemic in the republic, the latest data indicate.

Yerevan hospitals conducted over 2,100 coronavirus tests in the past twenty-four hours, the ministry said.

The Armenian population equals 2.9 million people, which means that the coronavirus infection has been identified among 0.9% of the republic’s residents since the start of the pandemic in the country. Over this time, 115,765 coronavirus tests have been conducted in the republic, of which 23% have been positive.

In the past week, Armenia registered no less than 400 new coronavirus cases daily whereas for three consecutive days the COVID-19 case count equaled 700.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said on June 26 that the situation was prompting the authorities to tighten anti-epidemic requirements.

According to Pashinyan, Armenia was now among the states with the largest number of infections per 1 million people. He stressed again that the basic problem was that Armenian citizens did not fully realize that they were massively breaching anti-epidemic requirements.

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.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 10,819,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 519,270 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 6,040,000 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.