The death toll from coronavirus eclipsed one million on Monday, according to a johns Hopkins University account.
Nine months after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastates global economies, confronts science that opposes politics, turns the way companies paint, and impacts the way others live their lives in the coming years, governments are striving to engage the virus, and scientists around the world are competing for a vaccine.
With more than 200,000 deaths, the United States leads the world, followed by Brazil (more than 142,000), India (more than 95,000), Mexico (more than 76,000) and the United Kingdom (more than 42,000). 1 in five coronavirus deaths worldwide, despite America’s wealth and medical resources.
The dark landmark is larger than the population of Jerusalem or Austin, Texas, or twice and a half the number of other people who visited Woodstock in 1969, more than 4 times the death toll from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Even in this case, the figure is almost an insufficient count due to insufficient or inconsistent evidence and reports and suspected cover-up in some countries.
And the number keeps growing. Nearly 5,000 deaths are reported on average each day. Parts of Europe are affected by a wave of moments and experts fear that the same fate awaits the United States.
The virus first gave the impression on hospitalized patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan no later than 2019, where the first death was reported on January 11. By the time the government closed the city about two weeks later, millions of travelers had arrived and the Chinese government has criticized the fact that it has not done enough to alert other countries to the threat.
Heads of government in countries such as Germany, South Korea and New Zealand have worked well to involve him; others, such as US President Donald Trump and Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, rejected the severity of the risk and the recommendation of scientists, including hospitals. were fed to critical patients.
The virus has forced compromises between security and economic well-being, and possible options have left millions of people vulnerable, especially the poor, minorities and the elderly.
With so many out-of-sight deaths in hospital wards and grouped on the margins of society, the milestone recalls how grim the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is sometimes attributed: a death is a tragedy, millions of deaths are a statistic.
The pandemic death toll of 1 million in such a short time rivals some of the gravest threats to public health, beyond and today.
It surpasses annual AIDS deaths, which resulted in the deaths of another 690,000 international people last year. The number of virus deaths is close to 1. 5 million international deaths each year from tuberculosis, killing more people than any other infectious disease.
But “COVID’s control over humanity is incomparably greater than that of other reasons of death,” Lawrence Gostin, Professor of Global Fitness Law at Georgetown University, told The Associated Press, who pointed to unemployment, poverty and depression through the pandemic and deaths from a cache of other untreated diseases.
Despite its lethality, the virus has claimed fewer lives than the so-called Spanish flu, which killed between 40 and 50 million people internationally in two years just over a century ago.
This pandemic occurred before scientists had microscopes strong enough to identify the enemy or antibiotics capable of treating bacterial pneumonia that killed most victims. He also took a very different course. In the United States, for example, Spanish influenza killed some 675,000 people, but most of those deaths occurred when a sudden wave struck the winter of 1918-1919.
SoArray the disease has left only a small footprint in Africa, from the first models that predicted thousands more deaths.
But cases have recently increased in countries such as Britain, Spain, Russia and Israel. In the United States, academics’ return to college campuses has led to further outbreaks. With the approval and distribution of a vaccine, the number of dead will most likely increase in months and with winter approaching in the northern hemisphere.
“We’re just at the beginning. We’ll see many more weeks before this pandemic than we had,” Gostin said.
The Associated Press contributed to the report.