Worldwide death toll passes 2 million mark
Virus is spreading faster than ever, and several variants are moving around the globe
Two million dead.
It is more people than the number who call the state of Nebraska home. It is roughly equal to the population of Slovenia. And it is more than three times the number of people killed in the U.S. Civil War.
The global death toll from the coronavirus soared past the 2 million mark Friday, just over a year after the virus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
And the carnage is spreading faster now than at any other time in the pandemic.
It took more than nine months for the world to pass 1 million deaths in late September, a moment that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called “mindnumbing” and “an agonizing milestone.” In a little more than three months, the virus has claimed another 1 million lives.
And as it spreads, it continues to evolve.
It is the same virus, but several variants now circulating around the world are the subject of urgent scientific study, as some have been shown to be even more infectious than the iteration that at one point last spring forced about 4 billion people to shelter at home.
One variant that stymied efforts to contain outbreaks in Britain in the fall is now responsible for a flood of patients that is stretching the nation’s hospitals to the breaking point, officials say.Even before the new variants were discovered, the death toll in the U.S. already dwarfed that of any other country. The virus has now killed nearly 400,000 Americans, a New York Times database shows. And with the country’s new cases still averaging about 240,000 per day, there are few signs of it slowing.
Next week, as president, Joe Biden will take charge of what has been perhaps the world’s most disjointed response to the pandemic. In the course of the past year, even the decision of whether to wear a mask became politicized.
Biden, like his counterparts around the world, will have an increasingly available tool at his disposal in the form of vaccines. He has vowed to have 100 million doses
in arms during his first 100 days in office, and other governments have likewise made ambitious pledges.
But the initial rollouts in many countries have been met with problems: logistical confusion, shortages of doses, unequal distribution and bureaucratic hurdles that have slowed the process of getting shots into arms.
Israel’s inoculation process has been the fastest, with roughly 25 percent of its population of 9 million getting vaccinations in just one month. Britain has sped up its efforts, and in the week ending Jan. 10 added more than 1.2 million people to the number who had been given shots, edging near the government’s goal of more than 2 million per week. More than 3 million people have now been give at least a first dose of a vaccine in Britain, and Italy says it has given 1 million shots.