The overall death toll from the coronavirus exceeded three million people today, Saturday, amid repeated setbacks in the global vaccination campaign and the worsening crisis in countries such as Brazil, India and France.
The number of lives lost, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is equal to the population of Caracas, Venezuela; Kiev, Ukraine, or in the metropolitan area of Lisbon, Portugal. It is above the number of Chicago residents (2.7 million), and is the equivalent of those in Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
The actual figure is believed to be significantly higher due to the possible cover-up of deaths by governments and the many cases that were ignored in the early stages of the outbreak that began in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
When the gloomy threshold of two million deaths was exceeded last January, vaccination campaigns had just begun in Europe and the United States. Today they are underway in more than 190 countries, although their success in virus containment varies widely.
While campaigns in the United States and Britain are well advanced and people and businesses are beginning to contemplate life after the pandemic, other places, mostly poor nations, though also some rich ones, are lagging behind in the administration of vaccines and have imposed new confinements and restrictions on the increase in infections.
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Globally, deaths are rising again, with a daily average of about 12,000, and infections are also on an upward trajectory, with about 700,000 a day.
“This is not the situation we want to be in 16 months after the start of the pandemic, when we have proven control measures,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the leading experts on COVID-19 of the World Health Organization. health.
In Brazil, home to 3,000 deaths a day, the equivalent of a quarter of deaths worldwide in recent weeks, a WHO official compared the health crisis to a “rabid hell.” A more contagious variant of the virus has spread across the nation.
As infections rise, hospitals are running out of sedatives. As a result it has been reported that some doctors dilute the remaining supplies and even tie patients to their beds while inserting breathing tubes down their throats.
The slow progress of immunization efforts has crushed the pride of Brazilians, who used to carry out huge vaccination campaigns that were the envy of developing nations.
Following the example of its president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has compared the virus to a flu, the Ministry of Health spent months betting everything on a single vaccine and ignoring other producers. When bottlenecks began in distribution, it was already too late to get large amounts of doses on time.
Seeing so many patients suffer and die alone in their Rio de Janeiro hospital led nurse Lidiane Melo to take desperate measures.
In the early days of the pandemic, when patients demanded consolation that she was too busy to give them, Melo filled two rubber gloves with warm water, tied them by her fingers, and placed them in her hands. the patient to simulate a loving caress.
Some have dubbed this practice the “hand of God,” which is now the image of a nation mired in a health emergency that doesn’t look like it’s over.
“Patients can’t get visits. Unfortunately, there’s no way. So this is a way to give them psychological support, to be with the patient holding hands,” Melo noted. “And this year is worse, the severity of patients is a thousand times greater. “
The situation is equally dire in India, where the rise in infections in February after months of steady decline took authorities by surprise. In a surge driven by new virus variants, India recorded more than 180,000 new infections within 24 hours last week, for a national total of more than 13,900,000.
The problems India had overcome last year are once again tormenting health officials. Only 178 fans were free on Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, a city of 29 million people that on the eve confirmed 13,000 more cases of COVID-19.
The challenges facing India have consequences beyond its borders as it is the main vaccine provider of COVAX, a United Nations-sponsored program to bring the drug to the poorest areas of the world. Last month, the government said it would suspend exports until its infection rate drops.
The WHO recently described the supply as precarious. Up to 60 countries may not receive more doses until June, according to one estimate. To date, COVAX has shipped about 40 million doses to more than 100 countries, enough for just 0.25% of the world’s population.
Globally, about 87% of the 700 million doses dispensed went to rich nations. While 1 in 4 people are already immunized, in the poor the proportion drops to one in more than 500.
In recent days, the United States and some European countries have suspended the administration of the drug developed by Johnson & Johnson while investigating the appearance of unusual but dangerous thunderstorms. The AstraZeneca and Oxford University vaccine has suffered delays and restrictions for fear of clotting problems.
Another concern: poor countries depend on vaccines manufactured by China and Russia, which some scientists believe provide less protection than those from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
The director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China acknowledged last week that those developed there offer a low level of protection and said authorities are considering mixing them with others to improve their effectiveness.
In the United States, where more than 560,000 people have died from the virus – more than one in six deaths worldwide – hospitalizations and deaths have dropped, businesses are reopening and life is back to normal. in several states. The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell to 576,000 last week, its postCOVID-19 low.
But progress has been erratic and in recent weeks new outbreaks of contagion have emerged, the most serious in Michigan. However, deaths have fallen to an average of about 700 daily, far from the record of about 3,400 by mid-January.
In Europe, countries are feeling the effects of a more contagious variant that first swept Britain and has raised the death toll from COVID-19 on the continent to over a million people.
France’s intensive care units care for about 6,000 people with severe coronavirus disease, a figure not seen since the first wave a year ago.
According to Dr. Marc Leone, director of the ICU at the Hospital Nord in Marseille, the exhausted front-line workers who were celebrated as heroes at the start of the pandemic now feel alone and cling to the hope that the new school closure and other restrictions will help curb the contagion in the coming weeks.
“There is exhaustion, more bad mood. We have to be careful because there are a lot of conflicts,” he noted. “We will do our best to spend these 15 days the best we can.”