RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The global coronavirus death toll rose to an incredible 3 million on Saturday amid repeated setbacks in the global vaccination campaign and a deepening crisis in places such as Brazil, India and France.
The number of lives lost, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is approximately equal to the population of Kiev, Ukraine; Caracas, Venezuela; or metropolitan Lisbon, Portugal. It is larger than Chicago (2.7 million) and equivalent to Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
The true number is believed to be significantly higher due to possible concealment by the government, and the many cases overlooked in the early stages of the outbreak that began in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.
When the world crossed the bleak threshold of 2 million deaths in January, immunization stations had just begun in Europe and the United States. Today, they are active in more than 190 countries, although progress in controlling the virus varies widely.
While the campaigns in the US and Britain have progressed and people and businesses there are beginning to consider life after the pandemic, other places, mostly poorer countries, but also some rich ones, are lagging behind and have imposed new closures and other restrictions as virus cases increase.
Globally, deaths are rising again, averaging about 12,000 a day, and new cases are on the rise, darkening 700,000 a day.
“This is not the situation where we want a pandemic within 16 months where we have evidence,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the leaders of the World Health Organization on COVID-19.
In Brazil, where the death toll is around 3,000 a day, who have lost a quarter of their lives worldwide in the past few weeks, the crisis has been likened by a WHO official to a ‘furious inferno’. A more contagious variant of the virus is starting to spread across the country.
As the cases increase, the critical sedatives in hospitals run out. As a result, there have been reports of some doctors diluting what is out there, and even tying patients to their beds while breathing tubes are pushed into their throats.
The slow explosion of vaccines has shattered the pride of Brazilians in their own history of major immunization campaigns that were the envy of the developing world.
According to President Jair Bolsonaro, who compared the virus to little more than a flu, his Ministry of Health bet on a single vaccine for months and ignored other producers. When bottlenecks appeared, it was too late to get large quantities in time.
To see how many patients in her hospital in Rio de Janeiro suffer and die, nurse Lidiane Melo was forced to take desperate measures.
In the early days of the pandemic, Melo filled two rubber gloves with hot water, when they cried out for comfort that she was too busy providing, stuffed, knotted and tied around a patient’s hand to simulate a loving touch. .
Some have dubbed the practice the ‘hand of God’, and it is now the destructive image of a people affected by a medical emergency without an end to it.
‘Patients cannot receive visitors. Unfortunately, there is no way. It is therefore a way to offer psychological support, to be there with the patient holding their hand, ”Melo said. She added: “And this year it’s worse, the severity of patients is 1000 times greater.”
This situation is equally dire in India, where the cases escalated in February after weeks of steady decline, which surprised the authorities. In a boom driven by variants of the virus, India has seen more than 180,000 new infections in one 24-hour period over the past week, bringing the total number of cases to more than 13.9 million has.
Problems that India overcame last year are coming back to health officials. Only 178 ventilators were free on Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, a city of 29 million, where 13,000 new infections were reported the previous day.
The challenges facing India resonate beyond its borders as the country is the largest provider of shots to COVAX, the UN-sponsored program to distribute vaccines to poorer parts of the world. Last month, India said it would halt vaccine exports until the spread of the virus within the country slowed.
The WHO recently described the supply situation as uncertain. Up to 60 countries may not receive more shots, according to June. To date, COVAX has delivered approximately 40 million doses in more than 100 countries, enough to cover barely 0.25% of the world population.
Worldwide, approximately 87% of the 700 million doses distributed in rich countries are given. While 1 in 4 people in affluent countries has received a vaccine, the figure is 1 in over 500.
Over the past few days, the U.S. and some European countries have suspended the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine while authorities investigate extremely rare but dangerous blood clots. The AstraZeneca vaccine was also hit with delays and restrictions due to a coagulation anxiety.
Another concern: Poorer countries rely on vaccines manufactured by China and Russia, which some scientists say offer less protection than those of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
Last week, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that the country’s vaccines offer low protection and said officials are considering mixing them with other shots to improve their effectiveness.
In the U.S., where more than 560,000 lives have been lost, more than 1 in 6 of the COVID-19 deaths worldwide, hospitalizations and deaths have dropped, and businesses reopened and life began to return to something normally number of states closer. . The number of Americans who filed unemployment benefits fell to 576,000 last week, a low after COVID-19.
But progress has been impeccable, and new hot spots – particularly Michigan – have flared up in recent weeks. Nevertheless, the deaths in the US average up to about 700 per day, and it drops from a January high of about 3,400.
In Europe, countries feel the heaviest of a more contagious variant that plagued Britain for the first time and pushed the continent’s COVID-19-related death toll beyond 1 million.
Nearly 6,000 seriously ill patients are being treated in French critical care units, which have not been seen since the first wave a year ago.
Dr Marc Leone, head of intensive care at Marseille North Hospital, said exhausted frontline staff members who were admitted as heroes at the start of the pandemic now feel alone and hold on to the hope of renewed school closures and other restrictions help fight the virus in the coming weeks.
‘There’s exhaustion, more bad moods. You have to tread carefully because there is a lot of conflict, ”he said. “We’re giving everything we need to get through these 15 days as best we can.”
___
Goodman reports from Miami and Cheng from London. AP authors John Leicester in Paris and Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi contributed to this report.