Covid took five million lives

Reuters | Geneva

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

The pandemic that stormed the human population almost two years ago had took within 5 million lives, says a new toll published yesterday.

While it took just over a year for the Covid-19 death toll to hit 2.5 million, the next 2.5 million deaths were recorded in just under eight months, according to a Reuters analysis.

The statistics also show that an average of 8,000 deaths were reported daily across the world over the last week, or around five deaths every minute.

However, the global death rate has been slowing in recent weeks. The report also points out that even though the virus had transformed into several strains, the most prominent among them is Delta that is of utmost threat to unvaccinated people.

The variant has exposed the wide disparities in vaccination rates between rich and poor nations, and the upshot of vaccine hesitancy in some western nations.

More than half of all global deaths reported on a seven-day average were in the United States, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and India. There has been increasing focus in recent days on getting vaccines to poorer nations, where many people are yet to receive a first dose, even as their richer counterparts have begun giving booster shots.

More than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data. The World Health Organisation this week said its COVAX distribution programme would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.