On the road to end pandemic, more people vaccinated than total cases to date: data

(Reuters) – More people are now vaccinated against COVID-19 than those infected with the virus that has swept the world in the past year, an important step on the road to ending the pandemic, data shows published Wednesday.

Despite historical data, it is still not clear how long it will take to vaccinate the world. Many of those who were vaccinated received only one of the two required doses.

A total of 104.9 million doses of the vaccine have been administered, according to Our World in Data from the University of Oxford here and the latest data Wednesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. The total vaccinated now exceeds 104.1 million cases of COVID-19 infection in a Reuters global tracker here.

COVID-19 infections continue to rise in 44 countries and the virus has killed at least 2.26 million people worldwide, according to the Reuters tracker. Health experts are rushing to vaccinate as many as possible in the face of new, more contagious variants.

Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center here confirms global purchases of 7.7 billion doses with an additional 5 billion doses being negotiated or reserved as optional extensions of existing agreements.

Israel leads the world, having administered enough doses of the vaccine to 28% of its population, assuming each person needs two doses, according to Our World in Data.

World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Tuesday called for greater cooperation among nations to achieve global immunization on the scale needed to end the pandemic.

“Despite the growing number of vaccine options, current manufacturing capacity only meets a fraction of global needs,” he wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.

“Allowing the majority of the world’s population to go unvaccinated will not only perpetuate unnecessary disease and death and the pain of ongoing lockdowns, but also spawn new viral mutations as COVID-19 continues to spread among unprotected populations, ”he writes bit.ly/ 3oGW3Qd.

Wealthy countries competing for COVID-19 vaccine supplies must consider the situation in the world’s poorest regions, the WHO said last week, warning vaccine hoarding “keeps the pandemic on fire” .

GRAPHIC-COVID-19 global tracker: here