:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/elfinanciero/NXW7TGCORVEQRNADPT7UASZDJM.jpg "Death toll exceeds 6 million – El Financiero")
BANGKOK.— La death toll from COVID-19 reached 6 million on Monday, underscoring that the pandemic, now in its third year, is far from over.
The milestone is a tragic reminder of the persistent nature of the pandemic, as people ditched masks, resumed travel and reopened businesses around the world.
The last million deaths were recorded in the last four months, according to the count prepared by the Universidad Johns Hopkins.
That is a slightly lower rate than the previous million deaths, but it makes clear that many countries are still suffering from the coronavirus.
Remote Pacific Islands long protected from the virus by their isolation are now facing their first outbreaks and deaths, fueled by the contagious omicron variant.
Hong Kongwhere deaths have soared, will test all of its 7.5 million people three times this month in an effort to stick to China’s zero-tolerance approach to the disease.
Mortality rates remained high in Poland, Hungary, Romania and other countries in Eastern Europewhere more than 1.5 million refugees fled the war in Ukraine, a country with low vaccination coverage and high numbers of cases and deaths.
United States it was approaching one million reported deaths in its territory, the highest official death toll in the world.
Worldwide death tolls remain highest among people unvaccinated against the virus, said Tikki Pang, a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore’s medical school and co-chair of the Asia Pacific Immunization Coalition.
“This is a disease of the unvaccinated, look at what is happening in Hong Kong right now, the health system is overwhelmed,” said Pang, former director of research policy and cooperation at the World Health Organization (WHO). “The vast majority of deaths and severe cases are in the vulnerable, unvaccinated segment of the population.”
It took the world seven months to record its first million deaths from the virus before the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Four months later another million people had died, and since then another million people have died every three months, until the sum reached 5 million at the end of October. Now there are six million, more than the populations of Berlin and Brussels combined, or more than all of Costa Rica.
Despite the enormity of the figure of six million deaths, experts say the real number is likely much higher.
Due to poor recording and testing in many parts of the world, many deaths have not been attributed to COVID-19. In addition, there is the excess mortality associated with the pandemic even though it is not specifically due to COVID-19 infections, such as people who died of preventable causes but did not receive treatment because hospitals were full.
Edouard Mathieu, Website Data Controller Our World in Datapointed out that when the excess mortality figures of the countries are studied, it seems likely that up to four times more people have died due to the pandemic than what the official death figures indicate.
An analysis of excess mortality from a team of The Economist estimates that the number of deaths from COVID-19 is between 14 million and 23.5 million people.
In total, some 450 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide.
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