Coronavirus deaths reach 3 million worldwide

Three million lives: this is roughly equivalent to the loss of population in Berlin, Chicago or Taipei. The staircase is so stunning that sometimes it only starts to feel real in places like cemeteries.

According to a New York Times database, the total number of deaths in the world, Covid-19, exceeded three million on Saturday. More than 100,000 people have died of Covid-19 in France. Mortality rates are rising in Michigan. Morgues in some cities in India are full of corpses.

And as the United States and other rich nations struggle to vaccinate their populations, new hot spots have emerged in parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The overall death rate is also accelerating. After the coronavirus appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the pandemic claimed one million lives in nine months. It took another four months to kill his second million and only three months to kill another million.

“We are running out of space,” Mohammed Shamin, a gravedigger in New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, said on Saturday. “If we don’t get more space, you’ll soon see rotting corpses on the streets.”

Deaths are the most tragic aspect of the pandemic, but they are not the only cost.

Many millions more have been infected with the virus, some with effects that can last for years or even a lifetime. Livelihoods were destroyed. Global work and travel have been disrupted in profound and potentially long-lasting ways.

The official balance sheet almost certainly does not take into account all the pandemic deaths in the world. Some of these deaths could have been wrongly attributed to other causes, such as the flu or pneumonia, while others died as a result of extensive life disruptions.

The pandemic has also exacerbated inequalities that were difficult to bear even on a regular basis.

Nanthana Chobcheun, 67, who works in a wet market in the Thai city of Bangsaen, said her income has dropped by half since the coronavirus broke out. But she can’t afford to stop working, she added, even as the number of cases in Thailand increases.

“Young, rich people enjoy the nightlife, even when there is a contagious disease, and they gather carelessly in the world,” said Nanthana, who has diabetes and high blood pressure on Saturday.

“For us, the little ones, and especially the old ones like me, it’s different,” she added, sitting in a chair in the middle of piles of dried fish.

Some parts of the world may turn the corner. The United States and the United Kingdom have seen declining death rates in recent weeks as they launch aggressive vaccination programs. In Israel, 56 percent of the population had been completely vaccinated since Friday, according to a New York Times tracker.

At the same time, new outbreaks continue to appear in rich countries. This shocked millions of people – from Madrid to Los Angeles – who once expected regular life to resume in tandem with vaccine launches.

In France, on the verge of a third national deadlock, a deep sense of fatigue and frustration has taken root in a seemingly endless cycle of coronavirus restrictions. The third blockade has limited outdoor activities, forced non-essential stores to close, banned travel between regions and closed schools for a month.

One of the few highlights is the vaccination campaign, which has finally picked up speed after a slow start in recent months. More than 12 million people have received at least one first blow, and the government expects another eight million to be vaccinated by mid-May, when a gradual reopening will begin.

Poland is struggling to find a way out of the third wave of infections, even though the wave seems to have peaked. A recent rise in Covid-19 infections and deaths puts enormous and insufficient pressure on the healthcare system.

With a record number of patients on fans, the government announced on Wednesday that it will extend the current restrictions by a week, shattering hotel owners’ hopes of reopening them during the traditional May break and provoking more protests from business owners.

Japan, which lifted the state of emergency less than a month ago and plans to host the Olympics this summer, said on Friday it would tighten restrictions in Tokyo and other cities to prevent growing snow infections in another country. the fourth wave.

In the United States, too, dangerous variants are causing new outbreaks, although new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have fallen from their peaks in January. Michigan, the hardest-hit state, reports an average of about 50 deaths a day, twice as many as two weeks ago, along with about 7,800 new cases.

The United States and parts of Western Europe have borne the brunt of deaths in the first year of the pandemic. Now the hot spots for deaths are in regions such as Eastern Europe, South Asia and Latin America.

In Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, the virus has claimed more than 368,000 lives and killed people at a record rate of about 2,900 a day. Vaccinations are slow, variants are rampant, and hospitals are overloaded.

In Mexico, where Covid-19 killed more than 211,000 people, only about one in 10 people in the country received the vaccine.

“It’s so hard for many of us,” said Ivan Mena Alvarez, a piñata maker in Mexico City who lost 11 members of his extended family to the virus. “It never occurred to you that there would be so many dead in such a short time.”

While richer countries have essentially accumulated vaccines, the poorest are desperately fighting for doses.

Safety concerns about AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, based on a small number of people who have developed blood clotting problems, have also exacerbated the vaccine’s reluctance around the world – a trend that threatens to prolong the pandemic and to reverse the innate vaccination impulses.

Most countries are not even close to gaining herd immunity, to the point where enough people are immune to coronavirus to no longer spread to a population.

In India, where the death toll exceeded 175,000, more than 114 million people had received a first dose of the Covid vaccine since Friday. But that represents only 7.4% of the population.

The pandemic has undermined decades of economic progress in India. Now, the country of 1.3 billion people averages about 1,000 deaths a day, like a huge outbreak in the western state of Maharashtra, which hosts Mumbai.

India reported 1,341 deaths on Saturday alone, along with nearly a quarter of a million new cases.

Swapnil Gaikwad, 28, whose uncle died in Maharashtra’s Osmanabad district on Friday, said it took seven hours to perform traditional burial rituals because the local crematorium was so busy.

“There was absolutely no space and more ambulances were arriving,” he said.

At one point, Mr. Gaikwad said, he became so angry that he cried to the staff.

A worker there began to cry. Mr Gaikwad said some workers told him they were so busy at the crematorium that they had not seen their own families for days.

Oscar Lopez and Monica Pronczuk contributed to the reporting.