Covid-19 toll around world tops 3 million
Some countries returning to normal as others struggle
RIO DE JANEIRO — The global death toll from the coronavirus topped 3 million people Saturday amid repeated setbacks in the worldwide vaccination campaign and deepening crises in places such as Brazil, India and France.
The number of lives lost, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Kyiv, Ukraine; Caracas, Venezuela; or metropolitan Lisbon, Portugal. It is bigger than Chicago and equivalent to Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
And the true number is believed to be higher because of possible government concealment and the many cases overlooked in the early stages of the outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, with deaths mistakenly attributed to other causes such as flu or pneumonia.
In the United States, the death toll was nearing 567,000 as of Saturday evening.
Many millions more have been sickened by the virus, some with effects that may last for years. Livelihoods have been ruined. Global work and travel have been disrupted in profound and potentially long-lasting ways.
When the world back in January passed the threshold of 2 million deaths, immunization drives had just started in Europe and the United States. Today, they are underway in more than 190 countries, though progress in bringing the virus under control varies widely.
Campaigns in the U.S. and Britain have hit their stride, and people and businesses there are beginning to contemplate life after the pandemic. In Israel, 56% of the population had been fully vaccinated as of Friday.
But other places, mostly poorer countries but some rich ones as well, are lagging behind in putting shots in arms and have imposed new lockdowns and other restrictions as virus cases soar.
WIDESPREAD EFFECTS
In France, which is in the throes of a third national lockdown, a sense of fatigue and frustration has taken root over the long cycle of coronavirus restrictions. The third lockdown has limited outdoor activities, forced nonessential shops to close, banned travel between regions and shut schools for a month.
Japan, which lifted a state of emergency less than a month ago and plans to host the Olympics this summer, said Friday that it would tighten restrictions in Tokyo and other cities to prevent a surge of infections from snowballing into a fourth wave.
Nanthana Chobcheun, 67, who works at a wet market in the eastern Thai city of Bangsaen, said her income had fallen by half since the coronavirus emerged. But she cannot afford to stop working, she said, even as Thailand’s caseload rises.
“Young people, rich people are enjoying their nightlife, even when there’s a contagious disease, and gathering without a care in the world,” Nanthana, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, said at an open-air market Saturday.
“For us little people, and especially old people like me, it’s different,” she said, sitting on a stool amid piles of dried fish.
In Mexico, where covid-19 has killed more than 211,000 people, only about 1 in 10 people have received vaccinations.
“It’s so hard for a lot of us,” said Ivan Mena Alvarez, a pinata maker in Mexico City who has lost 11 members of his extended family to the virus. “It just never crossed your mind that there would be so many dead in so little time.”
SURGE IN BRAZIL
Deaths are on the rise worldwide, running at about 12,000 per day on average, and new cases are climbing, too, eclipsing 700,000 a day.
“This is not the situation we want to be in 16 months into a pandemic, where we have proven control measures,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the World Health Organization’s leaders on covid-19.
In Brazil, where deaths are running at about 3,000 per day, accounting for one-quarter of the lives lost worldwide in recent weeks, the crisis has been likened to a “raging inferno” by one WHO official. A more contagious variant of the virus has been rampaging across the country.
As cases surge, hospitals are running out of critical sedatives. There have been reports of some doctors diluting what supplies remain and even tying patients to their beds while breathing tubes are pushed down their throats.
The slow vaccine rollout has crushed Brazilians’ pride in their history of carrying out huge immunization campaigns that were the envy of the developing world.
Taking cues from President Jair Bolsonaro, who has likened the virus to little more than a flu, his Health Ministry for months bet big on a single vaccine, ignoring other producers. When bottlenecks emerged, it was too late to get large quantities in time.
Watching so many patients suffer and die alone at her Rio de Janeiro hospital impelled nurse Lidiane Melo to take desperate measures.
In the early days of the pandemic, as sufferers were calling out for comfort that she was too busy to provide, Melo filled two rubber gloves with warm water, knotted them shut and sandwiched them around a patient’s hand to simulate a loving touch.
Some have christened the practice the “hand of God,” and it is now the searing image of a nation roiled by a medical emergency with no end in sight.
“Patients can’t receive visitors. Sadly, there’s no way. So it’s a way to provide psychological support, to be there together with the patient holding their hand,” Melo said. “And this year it’s worse; the seriousness of patients is 1,000 times greater.”
VACCINE ISSUES
The situation is similarly dire in India, where cases spiked in February after weeks of steady decline, taking authorities by surprise. In a surge driven by variants, India saw more than 180,000 new infections in one 24-hour span last week.
Morgues in some Indian cities are overflowing with bodies.
“We are running out of space,” Mohammed Shamin, a gravedigger in New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, said Saturday. “If we don’t get more space, you will soon see dead bodies rotting in the streets.”
Problems that India had overcome last year are coming back to haunt health officials. Only 178 ventilators were free Wednesday in New Delhi, a city of 29 million, where 13,000 new infections were reported the previous day.
The challenges facing India reverberate beyond its borders since the country is the biggest supplier of shots to COVAX, the U.N.-sponsored program to distribute vaccines to poorer parts of the world. Last month, India said it would suspend vaccine exports until the virus’s spread inside the country slows.
The WHO recently described the supply situation as precarious. As many as 60 countries might not receive any more shots until June, by one estimate.
To date, COVAX has delivered about 40 million doses to more than 100 countries, enough to cover barely 0.25% of the world’s population.
Globally, about 87% of the 700 million doses dispensed have been given out in rich countries. While 1 in 4 people in wealthy nations have received a vaccine, in poor countries the figure is 1 in more than 500.
In recent days, the U.S. and some European countries put the use of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine on hold while authorities investigate rare but dangerous blood clots. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has likewise been hit with delays and restrictions because of a clotting scare.
Another concern is that poorer countries are relying on vaccines made by China and Russia, which some scientists believe provide less protection than those made by 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.
UNEVEN PROGRESS
In the U.S., hospitalizations and deaths have dropped, businesses are reopening, and life is beginning to return to something approaching normalcy in several states. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits tumbled last week to 576,000, a post-covid-19 low.
But progress has been patchy, and new hot spots — most notably Michigan — have flared up in recent weeks. Still, deaths in the U.S. are down to about 700 per day on average, plummeting from a mid-January peak of about 3,400.
In Europe, countries are feeling the brunt of a more contagious variant that first ravaged Britain and has pushed the continent’s death toll beyond 1 million.
Close to 6,000 gravely ill patients are being treated in French critical-care units, numbers not seen since the first wave a year ago.
Dr. Marc Leone, head of intensive care at North Hospital in Marseille, said exhausted frontline staff members who were feted as heroes at the start of the pandemic now feel alone and are clinging to hope that renewed school closings and other restrictions will help curb the virus in the coming weeks.
“There’s exhaustion, more bad tempers. You have to tread carefully because there are a lot of conflicts,” he said. “We’ll give everything we have to get through these 15 days as best we can.”