The global death toll from the coronavirus reached more than three million people today, Saturday, amid repeated setbacks in the global vaccination campaign and the worsening crisis in countries like Brazil, India or France.
According to data from Johns Hopkins University, the number of lives lost equals the population of Caracas, Venezuela; Kiev, Ukraine or the metropolitan area of Lisbon, Portugal. It is above Chicago’s population (2.7 million) and is the equivalent of Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
The true number is believed to be significantly higher due to possible cover-ups of government deaths and the many cases ignored in the early stages of the outbreak that began in Wuhan, China in late 2019.
When the grim threshold of two million deaths was passed last January, vaccination campaigns in Europe and the United States had just begun. Today, they are ongoing in more than 190 countries, although their success in controlling the virus varies widely.
While the campaigns in the United States and Great Britain are well advanced and the population and business are starting to think about life after the pandemic, other places, mostly poor countries, but also some rich ones, are lagging behind in administering vaccines. imposed new incarcerations and restrictions due to the increase in infections.
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Worldwide, deaths are on the rise again at an average of about 12,000 per day, and the number of infections is also on the rise, at about 700,000 per day.
“This is not the situation we want to be in 16 months from the start of the pandemic, if we have proven control measures,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the leading COVID-19 experts at the World Health Organization.
In Brazil, where there are about 3,000 deaths every day, the equivalent of a quarter of deaths worldwide in recent weeks, a WHO official compared the health crisis to a “raging hell.” A more contagious variant of the virus has spread across the country.
As infections increase, hospitals run out of sedatives. As a result, some doctors have been reported to 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 run massive vaccination campaigns that made developing countries jealous.
Following in the footsteps of its president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has compared the virus to a flu, the Health Ministry has spent months betting everything on one vaccine and ignoring other manufacturers. When the distribution bottlenecks started, it was too late to get large amounts of doses on time.
So many patients suffer and die alone in her hospital in Rio de Janeiro, nurse Lidiane Melo took desperate measures.
In the early days of the pandemic, when patients demanded comfort that she was very busy giving them, Melo filled two rubber gloves with warm water, tied them by the fingers, and wrapped them around the patient’s hand to make a Simulate loving caress.
Some have dubbed this practice as the “hand of God,” which now represents a nation trapped in a health emergency with no signs of end.
“Patients cannot receive visitors. Unfortunately there is no way. So this is a way to give them psychological support, to be with the patient holding his hand, “Melo said.” And this year is worse, the severity of the patients is a thousand times greater. “
The situation is just as dire in India, where the spike in infections in February, after months of steady decline, caught authorities off guard. In a wave sparked by new variants of the virus, India registered more than 180,000 new infections within 24 hours last week, for a national total of more than 13.9 million.
The troubles that India had overcome last year are haunting health officials once again. Just 178 fans were free on Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, a city of 29 million people who confirmed 13,000 more COVID-19 cases the day before.
The challenges facing India are having repercussions beyond its borders, as it is the primary supplier of vaccines for COVAX, a program sponsored by the United Nations to bring the drug to the poorest parts of the world. Last month, the government said it will suspend exports until the contamination rate drops.
The WHO recently described the offer as uncertain. It is estimated that 60 countries may not receive more doses by June. To date, COVAX has sent some 40 million doses to more than 100 countries, enough for only 0.25% of the world’s population.
Globally, about 87% of the 700 million doses provided went to wealthy countries. While 1 in 4 residents there has already been immunized, the proportion among the poor drops to 1 in more than 500.
In recent days, the United States and some European countries have suspended administration of the drug developed by Johnson & Johnson while investigating the occurrence of rare but dangerous blood clots. The AstraZeneca vaccine and the University of Oxford have been delayed and limited for fear of clotting problems.
Another concern: poor countries rely on vaccines made by China and Russia, which some scientists believe offer less protection than those provided by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
The director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention last week acknowledged that those developed there offer a low level of protection and said authorities are considering combining 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 in the world – hospital admissions and deaths have fallen, businesses have reopened, and life is returning to something similar to normal in several states . The number of Americans claiming unemployment benefits fell to 576,000 last week, the low point after COVID-19.
But progress has been uneven, and new sources of infection have surfaced in recent weeks, the most serious in Michigan. Still, the number of deaths has fallen to an average of about 700 a day, far from the record of about 3,400 in mid-January.
In Europe, countries are feeling the effects of a more contagious variant that first engulfed Britain, pushing the continent’s death toll from COVID-19 to over a million.
The French intensive care units are treating about 6,000 people with severe cases of coronavirus, a figure not seen since the first wave a year ago.
According to Dr Marc Leone, director of the ICU at Marseille North Hospital, the exhausted frontline workers who were celebrated as heroes at the start of the pandemic now feel alone and cling to the hope that the new school will close and others. restrictions will help curb the spread in the coming weeks.
‘There is exhaustion, more of a bad mood. You have to be careful because there are a lot of conflicts, “he said.” We will do everything we can to make the most of these 15 days.