MEXICO CITY (AP) – The global death toll from COVID-19 is 2 million higher than the threshold on Friday, amid the rollout of vaccines so huge but so unequal that in some countries there is real hope of overcoming the outbreak, while developing into other, lesser parts of the world, it seems like a distant dream.
The anesthetic figure was reached just over a year after the coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The number of dead, compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is approximately equal to the population of Brussels, Mecca, Minsk or Vienna. It is roughly equivalent to the metropolitan area of Cleveland or the entire state of Nebraska.
“There was an awful lot of deaths,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a pandemic expert and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, said. At the same time, he said, “our scientific community has also done extraordinary work.”
In affluent countries, including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada, and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some protection with at least one dose of vaccine developed at revolutionary speed and quickly allowed to be used.
But elsewhere, immunization drives have barely come off the ground. Many experts predict another year of loss and suffering in places such as Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for a quarter of the deaths worldwide.
“As a country, as a society, as citizens we did not understand,” laments Israel Gomez, a Mexican city paramedic who has been rushing COVID-19 patients for months, desperately searching was to vacant beds. “We did not understand that it is not a game, that it really exists.”
Mexico, a country of 130 million people, received only 500,000 doses of vaccine and barely put half of it in the arms of health workers.
This is in stark contrast to the situation for its affluent northern neighbor. Despite early delays, hundreds of thousands of people roll up their sleeves every day in the United States, where the virus has killed about 390,000 people, by far the highest toll in any country.
According to the University of Oxford, more than 35 million doses of different COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide.
While vaccinations in rich countries are hampered by long queues, inadequate budgets and a patchwork of state and local approaches, the barriers are much greater in poorer countries, which have poor health systems, crumbling transport networks, entrenched corruption and a lack of reliable electricity. vaccines to keep cold enough.
The majority of the world’s COVID-19 vaccine doses have also already been captured by rich countries. COVAX, a UN-backed project to deliver shots to developing parts of the world, had no vaccine, money and logistical assistance.
As a result, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization has warned that it is highly unlikely that herd immunity – which requires at least 70% of the world to be vaccinated – will be achieved this year. As the disaster has shown, it is not enough to eradicate the virus in a few places.
“Even if it happens in a few pockets, in a few countries, it will not protect people around the world,” said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan said this week.
Health experts also fear that if shots are not spread wide and fast enough, it could give the virus time to mutate and defeat the vaccine – ‘my nightmare scenario’, as Jha put it.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the 2 million milestone was “exacerbated by the absence of a globally coordinated effort.” He added: “Science has succeeded, but solidarity has failed.”
Meanwhile, in Wuhan, where the plague was discovered at the end of 2019, a global team of researchers led by WHO arrived on Thursday on a politically sensitive mission to investigate the origins of the virus, which is believed to have spread to humans. of wild animals.
The Chinese city of 11 million people is busy again, with little sign that it was once the center of the disaster, which was locked up for 76 days, with more than 3,800 dead.
“We are not scared or worried like in the past,” said Qin Qiong, a noodle shop owner. “We are living a normal life now. I take the subway every day to come work in the store. … Except for our customers who have to wear masks, everything else is the same. ‘
It took eight months to kill 1 million, but less than four months later to reach the next million.
While the death toll is based on figures provided by government agencies around the world, the actual number of deaths is thought to be significantly higher, in part due to inadequate tests and the many deaths incorrectly attributed to other causes, especially early in the outbreak.
“What was never on the horizon is that so many deaths would occur in the richest countries in the world,” said Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an expert in infectious diseases at the British University of Exeter, said. “That the richest countries in the world will run so badly is just shocking.”
In rich and poor countries, the crisis has devastated economies, thrown crowds out of work and plunged many into poverty.
In Europe, where more than a quarter of the world’s deaths have occurred, strict lockouts and curfews have been reintroduced to stem the revival of the virus, and a new variant that is thought to be more contagious is spreading in Britain and other countries , as well as the USA
Even in some of the richest countries, vaccinations were slower than expected. France, with the second largest economy in Europe and more than 69,000 known virus deaths, will need years, not months, to vaccinate its 53 million adults, unless it accelerates its rollout quickly, hampered by shortages, red tape and great suspicion about the vaccines.
In places like Poissy, a city with a blue collar west of Paris, the first shots of the Pfizer formula are illuminated and there is a feeling that there is light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.
“We have been living in it for almost a year. It’s not a life, ”says Maurice Lachkar, a retired 78-year-old acupuncturist who has been placed on the priority list for vaccination due to his diabetes and age. “If I get the virus, I’m done.”
Maurice and his wife, Nicole, who was also vaccinated, said they may even allow hugs with their two children and four grandchildren, which they have only seen once or twice from a socially safe distance since the pandemic.
“It’s going to be liberating,” he said.
Throughout the developing world, the images are strikingly similar: rows and rows of graves are dug, hospitals are pushed to the extreme and medical workers die due to lack of protective equipment.
In Peru, which has the highest death rate COVID-19 in Latin America, hundreds of health workers went on strike this week to demand better wages and working conditions in a country where 230 doctors have died from the disease. In Brazil, authorities in the largest city in the Amazon rainforest have planned to export hundreds of patients due to a dwindling supply of oxygen tanks that has resulted in some people dying at home.
In Honduras, dr. Cesar Umaña anesthesiologist 25 patients in their homes by phone because hospitals do not have enough capacity and equipment.
“It’s a complete chaos,” he said.
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Cheng reports from Toronto, Leicester from Poissy, France, and Goodman from Miami. Associated Press writers Victoria Milko in Jakarta, Indonesia and David Biller in Rio de Janeiro, along with AP video journalist Sam McNeil in Wuhan, China, contributed to the report.