COVID-19: More than 2 million people dead globally

The world has crossed the grim milestone of 2 million COVID-19 deaths, amid the rush by nations to roll out enough vaccines to save their populations.

The milestone was reached barely a year after the first death from the highly contagious disease was marked on January, 11, 2020 in Wuhan, China where the disease was said to have originated before it became a global pandemic.

With the roll out of vaccines, experts anticipate there will be a reduction in mortality but there have been more deaths especially in countries where the second wave of the virus is spreading unrestrained.

The recent spike in infection in Nigeria is feeding through into fatalities.

Last Friday, Nigeria announced its deadliest day of the pandemic with 23 lives lost under 24 hours, the country’s sharpest daily fatality toll.

“The reason for rise in fatalities is not far-fetched. When there are is a sharp rise in new cases, there will definitely be more deaths,& said Chikwe Ihekweazu, head of Nigeria’s infectious disease outfit, NCDC.

Barely a week after the global coronavirus infection hit 90 million, another 5 million has been added to the toll.

The global have crossed 95 million with 95,451,804 cases reported as of Sunday evening, according to the worldometer.info data.

Specifics

The global coronavirus deaths were 2,038,882 as of Monday morning, according to worldometer.info.

That figure includes over 407,000 deaths recorded in the United States, which has lost more people to COVID-19 than any other country.

The U.S. has recorded more than twice the number of deaths recorded by India, the next most impacted country which has reported a little over 150, 000 deaths.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) had warned that the death toll could hit two million before an effective vaccine is widely used. Worst still, health experts say there are likely far more people that died from the disease that were unreported.

Troubling stats

The world recorded two million deaths within the first year of the pandemic era, rising sharply from the 3,000 total in early March, 2020.

The death tally reached 20,000 in late March and passed half a million on June 28. About 20 days later, 100,000 more deaths were recorded and on September 27, the toll reached a million threshold. On December 5, the tally surpassed 1.5 million.

It took the world just about 20 days to go from 1.5 million deaths on December 5, 2020, to 2 million on January 15, 2021.

Today, 2.5 out of every 10,000 people have died from the disease, according to Devex.

Since the beginning of 2021, the U.S. has averaged just under 3,000 new COVID-19 related deaths daily.

After angry rioters and supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the United States tallied its deadliest day of the coronavirus pandemic with more than 4,000 lives lost from COVID-19 under one day, the first time the toll exceeded that milestone.

A day before, 3,915 deaths were recorded.

ALSO READ: India’s COVID-19 deaths cross 150,000 mark, total cases reach 10,374,932

The pandemic has now claimed 407,158 lives in the United States, according to worldometer.info . More than 24 million people have contracted the disease in the U.S., the highest of any country.

Nearly 30,000 people are battling COVID-19 complications in hospital beds in the U.S., the most the nation’s health-care system has taken on.

The U.S. recorded 264,703 new coronavirus cases on Friday as the confirmed cases nation-wide crossed 22 million.

While the U.S bears the brunt of the disease, the European region has recorded the largest percentage growth in deaths owing to recent spikes in fatalities in the U.K., Italy, Russia, France, Germany and Spain.

Africa

More than 78, 000 deaths have been linked to COVID-19 in Africa since Egypt became the first country in the continentto confirm a coronavirus case almost a year ago, data from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) revealed.

The victims include the former president of the Republic of the Congo, Jacques Joachim Yhombi-Opango; Somalia’s former prime minister Nur Hassan Hussein and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s chief of staff, Abba Kyari.

More than 2.6 million infections have been found in the continent of over a billion people thus far.

Cases and deaths in Africa account for less than 5 per cent of the global total, but exponential growth in COVID-19 cases officially declared the second wave with the spread of new variants of the disease have become a growing concern.

On top of this is the challenges in vaccine access in Africa and the rapid growth of vaccine hesitancy.

Vaccine race

Since Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old grandmother became the first person in the world to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in early December in the U.K., more than 40 countries have started administering coronavirus jabs among their populations.

While U.K. was the first to start, Israel is leading the world in terms of vaccination rate, with nearly 20 people in every hundred having received a dose, according to data compiled by Our World In Data, a research website affiliated with Oxford University.

This has been attributed to the country’s digitised healthcare system and the government’s early success in purchasing enough doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to cover the whole population.

The United Arab Emirates is currently occupying the second position after achieving, thus far, the vaccination rate of 8.98 per 100 people. The UAE approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccines for mass use and administered vaccines on December 14.

Bahrain followed at third position with 4.25 per 100 people.

The United Kingdom had administered 1.91 jabs per 100 people by January 8 to come fourth, while the United States had administered 1.79 doses by January 7 to come fifth.

Meanwhile, Africa does not seem to be a supply priority for the pharmaceutical companies producing the foremost vaccines at the moment.