The global number of deaths caused by coronavirus exceeded three million people on Saturday, amid repeated failures 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 the metropolitan area of Lisbon, Portugal. It is over the number of Chicago residents (2.7 million) and is the equivalent of Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
The true figure is believed to be significantly higher due to possible death cover 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 passed last January, vaccination campaigns had only just begun in Europe and the United States. Today they are underway in over 190 countries, although their success in containing the virus varies widely.
Although campaigns in the United States and the United Kingdom are well advanced and people and businesses are beginning to contemplate life after the pandemic, other places, especially poor nations and rich ones, lag behind in administering vaccines and have imposed new confinements and restrictions. due to the increase in infections.
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Globally, deaths are rising again, averaging around 12,000 a day, and infections are also on an upward trajectory, to around 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 world’s leading experts on COVID-19.
In Brazil, where there are about 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 “crazy hell”. A more contagious variant of the virus has spread across the country.
As infections grow, hospitals run out of sedatives. As a result, some doctors have reported diluting the remaining supplies and even tying 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 conduct huge vaccination campaigns that were the envy of developing nations.
Following the example of its president, Jair Bolsonaro, who compared the virus to the flu, the Ministry of Health spent months betting everything on one vaccine and ignoring other manufacturers. When the distribution blockages started, it was too late to get large amounts of doses on time.
Seeing so many patients suffering and dying alone in her hospital in Rio de Janeiro, she led nurse Lidiane Melo to desperate measures.
In the early days of the pandemic, when patients asked for consolation that she was too busy to give them, Melo filled two rubber gloves with warm water, tied them to her fingers, and put them on the patient’s hand to simulate a caress. lovely. .
Some have dubbed the practice “God’s hand,” which is now the image of a nation buried in a health emergency that has no signs of ending.
“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 it is worse, the severity of the patients is a thousand times higher “.
The situation is just as serious in India, where the rise in infections in February, after months of steady decline, has taken authorities by surprise. In a growth fueled by new variants of the virus, India recorded more than 180,000 new infections within 24 hours last week, for a national total of more than 13.9 million.
The problems that India overcame last year are once again haunting health officials. Only 178 fans were released on Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, a city of 29 million people that confirmed 13,000 other COVID-19 cases the day before.
The challenges facing India have consequences beyond its borders, as it is the main provider of vaccines for COVAX, a United Nations-sponsored program to bring the drug to the world’s poorest areas. Last month, the government said it would suspend exports until the infection rate dropped.
The WHO recently described the supply as precarious. Up to 60 countries may not receive more doses by June, according to an estimate. To date, COVAX has delivered approximately 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 distributed were to rich nations. While 1 in 4 people are already immunized, the proportion of the poor drops to one in over 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 rare but dangerous blood clots. The AstraZeneca vaccine and the University of Oxford have been postponed and restricted for fear of clotting problems.
Another concern: poor countries rely on vaccines produced by China and Russia, which some scientists believe offer less protection than those at Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca.
The director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention 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, business is reopening and life is back to normal in various states. The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell to 576,000 last week, falling after COVID-19.
But progress has been uneven, and in recent weeks new sources of infection have emerged, the worst in Michigan. However, deaths fell 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 has swept the UK for the first time, pushing the continent’s death toll from COVID-19 to over one million.
Intensive care units in France treat about 6,000 people with severe cases of coronavirus, a figure that has not been seen since the first wave a year ago.
According to Dr. Marc Leone, director of the ICU at the Northern Hospital in Marseille, the exhausted front-line workers, who were celebrated as heroes at the beginning of the pandemic, now feel lonely and cling to hope that new school closures and other restrictions help reducing the spread in the coming weeks.
“There is exhaustion, more bad mood. You have to be careful because there are a lot of conflicts, “he said.” We will do our best to spend these 15 days as well as we can.