The global death toll from the coronavirus reached a staggering 3 million people 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.
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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 proven controls,” 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.
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.
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.
Worldwide, about 87 percent of the 700 million doses are distributed in rich countries. 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 been hampering 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.
In the US, where more than 560,000 lives have been lost, more than 1 in 6 of the world’s deaths in Covid-19, hospitalizations and deaths have dropped, and businesses are reopening and life is returning to something normally in a number state nader. .
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.