As world closes on 5 million deaths, experts say no country escaped COVID

The worldwide COVID-19 toll is approximately 400 short of the five million death mark, data John Hopkins University’s resource centre on COVID-19 reported as of Monday. Experts have described the number as ‘staggering’ and said that no country has been able to escape the pandemic. 

The world has seen nearly two years of the coronavirus pandemic and a number of variants. In a press briefing on October 28, World Health Organization director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted that the rise in the global number of COVID-19 cases and deaths was driven by Europe. The health body warned that the pandemic is far from over, calling for a “global coordination” to end it.

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As per the data published by John Hopkins University on November 1, the world had recorded 4,999,609 deaths. 

“It’s quite possible that the number of deaths is double what we see. But five million is such a staggering number on its own. No country has been able to escape it,” Amber D’Souza, professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said. 

The death charts are led by the United States (745,832 fatalities). Brazil with  607,824 and India with 458,186 deaths follow next, as per the John Hopkins data. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has recorded 141,055 deaths so far.

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“Tens of thousands of Americans died just in the past month,” D’Souza said. She added that the figure is a reminder of how many people are still losing their lives nearly two years into the pandemic despite the availability of highly effective vaccines in the US. 

The death toll, as tallied by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Globally, COVID-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke.

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“This is a defining moment in our lifetime,” said Dr. Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health. “What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don’t get to another 5 million?”

With inputs from the Associated Press