Global COVID death toll tops 3 million
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic topped a staggering three million people yesterday amid repeated setbacks in the worldwide 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 about equal to the population of Kyiv, Ukraine; Caracas, Venezuela; or metropolitan Lisbon, Portugal. It is bigger than Chicago (2.7 million) and equivalent to Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
The true number is believed to be significantly 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.
When the world passed the bleak threshold of two million deaths back in January, 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.
While the campaigns in the US and Britain have hit their stride, and people and businesses there are beginning to contemplate life after the pandemic, 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.
Worldwide, deaths are on the rise again, running at around 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 (WHO)’s leaders on COVID-19.
In Brazil, where deaths are running at about 3,000 per day, accounting for onequarter 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. As a result, 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 own 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 a little more than a flu, his health ministry for months had bet big on a single vaccine, ignoring other producers. When bottlenecks emerged, it was too late to get large quantities in time.