Global virus death toll passes 2 milling mark

The global MEXICO CITY — death toll from COVID-19 topped 2 million Friday, crossing the threshold amid a vaccine rollout so immense but so uneven that in some countries there is real hope of vanquishing the outbreak, while in other, less-developed parts of the world, it seems a far-off dream.

The numbing 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 about equal to the population of Brussels, Mecca, Minsk or Vienna.

It is roughly equivalent to the Cleveland metropol- itan area or the entire state of Nebraska.

“There’s been a terrible amount of death,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, a pandemic expert and dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. At the same time, he said, “our scientific community has also done extraor- dinary work.”

In wealthy countries including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and Germany, millions of citi- zens have already been given some measure of protection with at least one dose of vaccine developed with revolu- tionary speed and quickly authorized for use.

But elsewhere, immunization drives have barely gotten off the ground. Many experts are predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for about a quarter of the world’s deaths.

“As a country, as a society, as citizens we haven’t understood,” lamented Israel

Gomez, a Mexico City paramedic who spent months shuttling COVID-19 patients around by ambulance, desperately looking for vacant hospital beds. “We have not understood that this is not a game, that this really exists.”

Mexico, a country of 130 million people, has received just 500,000 doses of vaccine and has put barely half of those into the arms of health care workers.

That’s in sharp contrast to the situation for its wealthier northern neighbor. Despite early delays, hundreds of thousands of people are roll- ing up their sleeves every day in the United States, where the virus has killed about 390,000, by far the highest toll of any country.

All told, over 35 million doses of various COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world, according to the University of Oxford.

ASSOCIATED PRESS The Archbishop of Lima, Carlos Castillo (center) swings a censer near portraits of COVID-19 victims projected on the facade of Lima’s cathedral during a Mass dedicated to the more than 30,000 deceased in Peru due to the coronavirus.