Coronavirus breaks another tragic global barrier: more than three million dead

RIO DE JANEIRO – The death toll worldwide from the coronavirus this Saturday exceeded three million, according to the count by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in the United States, just over three months after hitting the two million mark. The pandemic has taken eight and a half months to reach a million dead after the first confirmed death in China, and only three and a half months to spend the second million, January 15.

Now the new threshold is crossed a little more than three months after the previous one, which shows that the virus continues to spread and increase its death rate. Another brand that has been outdated today is that of 140 million infections worldwide since the first case reported in December 2019.

The United States remains the most affected country in total numbers, with some 31.5 million cases and more than 566,000 deaths, according to figures from JHU. Behind are India, with around 14.5 million cases and over 175,000 deaths, and Brazil, with more than 13.8 million infections and more than 368,000 deaths. If in the United States the epidemiological curve is downward, on the contrary in Brazil and India, it is growing and the two countries are now the global epicenters of the pandemic.

In the South American giant since last month, an average close to 3000 deaths every daythat is, almost a quarter of the total number of deaths reported daily worldwide.

This figure is more than double the number of daily deaths recorded in mid-February and, if the data is taken from March 7, it is the country with the most daily deaths in the world.

Deaths are also accelerating in India: in the country, out of 1300 million inhabitants, they register more than 1000 deaths every day, nine times more than those reported in early March. The increase is also in the rate of infections: today it exceeded 234,000 daily cases, a record during the pandemic, while in early March it reported an average of around 15,000 cases. .

Mexico, For its part, it is the third country in number of deaths, behind India, with more than 211,000 deaths, although it is ranked fourteenth in the world in number of infections.

In Europe, the second most punished continent by the pandemic behind Latin America, the nation with the most positive points is France, with around 5.3 million, while the most grieving is the United Kingdom, which is the fourth in the number of deaths in the world, exceeding 127,000 deaths. The big difference is that on the island 60% of the population has already received at least one dose of the anti-Covid vaccineThus, around thirty deaths are recorded per day, a tiny figure compared to 1,200 deaths at the end of January.

Despite the progress of the pandemic, rich countries continue to stockpile vaccines through bilateral agreements with laboratories, embargoes on input exports and without supporting the temporary patent exemption that was debated seven months ago at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

In the developed world itself, there are differences in the delivery of doses, and several European governments are debating or have already made progress in imposing additional restrictions to stop the circulation of viruses. In Japan, for example, the increase in the number of cases has fueled rumors that the Olympics, which had already been postponed last year due to the pandemic, could again be canceled. On the sidelines, the more than three million coronavirus deaths reached today represent a figure well above that of most viral epidemics of the 20th and 21st centuries, with notable exceptions such as the terrible “Spanish flu” and AIDS.

In 2009, influenza A (H1N1), known as “swine”, officially caused 18,500 deaths. But this balance was then revised upwards by the scientific journal The Lancet, who placed it between 151700 and 575400 death, a death toll comparable to that of seasonal flu, which causes between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the twentieth century, two major influenza pandemics linked to new viruses, 1957-58 – known as “Asian” – and 1968-70 – “Hong Kong flu” -, each caused about a million dead, according to a posteriori calculations. The great flu of 1918-1919, known as “Spanish”, has been one of the exceptions since killed around 50 million people, after infecting 500 million people around the world (27% of the planet’s population at that time). AIDS, for which there is still no effective vaccine 50 years after its onset, has killed nearly 33 million people, that is, 11 times more than Covid-19, which is much newer.

Thanks to the widespread use of antiretroviral therapy, the annual number of AIDS victims has fallen from the peak recorded in 2004 (1.7 million deaths). In 2019, the death toll was 690,000, according to UNAIDS.

AP and AFP agency

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