On January 12, 2023, Belgium reported 341 COVID-19 cases. In Belgium, the highest number of daily cases was recorded on January 26, 2022, at over 76 thousand. Overall, roughly 4.7 million people have tested positive for COVID1-9 in the country, to this day. According to the number of cases per region, Flanders was the most affected by the virus.

Death toll in Belgium

The first deaths due to the coronavirus in Belgium occurred on March 11, 2020. Since then, the number of deaths due to COVID-19 gradually increased, reaching the current death toll of 33,478 casualties.

Based on a comparison of coronavirus deaths in 210 countries relative to their population, Peru had the most losses to COVID-19 up until July 13, 2022. As of the same date, the virus had infected over 557.8 million people worldwide, and the number of deaths had totaled more than 6.3 million. Note, however, that COVID-19 test rates can vary per country. Additionally, big differences show up between countries when combining the number of deaths against confirmed COVID-19 cases. The source seemingly does not differentiate between "the Wuhan strain" (2019-nCOV) of COVID-19, "the Kent mutation" (B.1.1.7) that appeared in the UK in late 2020, the 2021 Delta variant (B.1.617.2) from India or the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) from South Africa.

The difficulties of death figures

This table aims to provide a complete picture on the topic, but it very much relies on data that has become more difficult to compare. As the coronavirus pandemic developed across the world, countries already used different methods to count fatalities, and they sometimes changed them during the course of the pandemic. On April 16, for example, the Chinese city of Wuhan added a 50 percent increase in their death figures to account for community deaths. These deaths occurred outside of hospitals and went unaccounted for so far. The state of New York did something similar two days before, revising their figures with 3,700 new deaths as they started to include “assumed” coronavirus victims. The United Kingdom started counting deaths in care homes and private households on April 29, adjusting their number with about 5,000 new deaths (which were corrected lowered again by the same amount on August 18). This makes an already difficult comparison even more difficult. Belgium, for example, counts suspected coronavirus deaths in their figures, whereas other countries have not done that (yet). This means two things. First, it could have a big impact on both current as well as future figures. On April 16 already, UK health experts stated that if their numbers were corrected for community deaths like in Wuhan, the UK number would change from 205 to “above 300”. This is exactly what happened two weeks later. Second, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which countries already have “revised” numbers (like Belgium, Wuhan or New York) and which ones do not. One work-around could be to look at (freely accessible) timelines that track the reported daily increase of deaths in certain countries. Several of these are available on our platform, such as for Belgium, Italy and Sweden. A sudden large increase might be an indicator that the domestic sources changed their methodology.

Where are these numbers coming from?

The numbers shown here were collected by Johns Hopkins University, a source that manually checks the data with domestic health authorities. For the majority of countries, this is from national authorities. In some cases, like China, the United States, Canada or Australia, city reports or other various state authorities were consulted. In this statistic, these separately reported numbers were put together. For more information or other freely accessible content, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Sciensano, the Belgian institute for health, is responsible for the epidemiological follow-up of the COVID-19 epidemic in collaboration with its partners and other healthcare actors. The data collected can provide insight into the dynamics of the epidemic, help to anticipate different scenarios and to elaborate possible measures to curb the spread of the virus.
From 31 March, Sciensano will make a set of data available to interested parties on a daily basis. This information is a support for decision making in the control of the epidemic.

The following datasets are published as open data:

• confirmed cases by date, age, sex and province
• confirmed cases by date and municipality
• cumulative number of confirmed cases by municipality
• hospitalizations by date and provinces
• mortality by date, age, sex, and province
• total number of tests performed by date

A description of the variables is available in the codebook. (Version: 2022-09-19)

As of January 17, 2023, the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 in the Benelux countries was around 57.7 thousand casualties. Since the first death occurred on February 6, 2020 in the Netherlands, new casualties were reported daily in the Benelux. The death toll amounted to approximately 33.5 thousand in Belgium and 23 thousand in the Netherlands.

Number of cases in the Benelux region

As of January 17, 2023, around 13.6 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus in the Benelux, from which 8.6 million in the Netherlands and 4.7 million in Belgium.

As of January 13, 2023, Bulgaria had the highest rate of COVID-19 deaths among its population in Europe at 548.6 deaths per 100,000 population. Hungary had recorded 496.4 deaths from COVID-19 per 100,000. Furthermore, Russia had the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Europe, at over 394 thousand.

Number of cases in Europe During the same period, across the whole of Europe, there have been over 270 million confirmed cases of COVID-19. France has been Europe's worst affected country with around 38.3 million cases, this translates to an incidence rate of approximately 58,945 cases per 100,000 population. Germany and Italy had approximately 37.6 million and 25.3 million cases respectively.

Current situation In March 2023, the rate of cases in Austria over the last seven days was 224 per 100,000 which was the highest in Europe. Luxembourg and Slovenia both followed with seven day rates of infections at 122 and 108 respectively.