RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – The global death toll from the coronavirus surpassed three million people on Saturday, amid repeated setbacks 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 above the number of residents in Chicago (2.7 million), and is the equivalent of Philadelphia and Dallas combined.
The true figure is believed to be significantly higher due to possible cover-ups of deaths 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 grim threshold of two million deaths was passed last January, vaccination campaigns had just begun in Europe and the United States. Today they are underway in more than 190 countries, although their success in containing the virus varies widely.
Although the campaigns in the United States and Great Britain are well advanced and the population and businesses are beginning to contemplate life after the pandemic, other places, mostly poor nations, but also some rich ones, are lagging behind in the administration of the vaccines and have imposed new confinements and restrictions due to the increase in infections.
Globally, deaths are on the rise again, averaging around 12,000 a day, and infections are also on an upward trajectory, at 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 leading experts on COVID-19 at the World Health Organization.
In Brazil, where there are around 3,000 deaths a day, the equivalent of a quarter of the deaths registered 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 nation.
As infections rise, hospitals are running out of sedatives. As a result, some doctors have been reported to dilute 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 carry out huge vaccination campaigns that were the envy of developing nations.
Following the example of its president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has compared the virus to a flu, the Health Ministry spent months betting everything on a single vaccine and ignoring other producers. When the distribution bottlenecks began, it was too late to get large quantities of doses on time.
Seeing so many patients suffer and die alone in her Rio de Janeiro hospital led nurse Lidiane Melo to desperate measures.
In the early days of the pandemic, when patients demanded a consolation that she was very busy to give them, Melo filled two rubber gloves with warm water, tied them by the fingers and placed them hugging the hand of the patient to simulate a loving caress .
Some have baptized this practice as the “hand of God”, which is now the image of a nation mired in a health emergency that has no signs of ending.
“Patients cannot receive visitors. Unfortunately, there is no way. So this is a way of giving them psychological support, of being with the patient, holding their hand, ”said Melo. “And this year is worse, the severity of the patients is 1,000 times greater.”
The situation is just as dire in India, where the spike in infections in February after months of steady decline took authorities by surprise. In a surge 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 India had overcome last year haunt health officials again. Only 178 fans were free Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, a city of 29 million that confirmed 13,000 more COVID-19 cases the day before.
The challenges facing India have consequences beyond its borders as it is the main supplier of vaccines for COVAX, a program sponsored by the United Nations to bring the drug to the poorest areas of the world. Last month, the government said it will suspend exports until its infection rate drops.
The WHO recently described the supply as precarious. Up to 60 countries may not receive more doses until June, according to one estimate. To date, COVAX has sent some 40 million doses to more than 100 countries, enough for just 0.25% of the world’s population.
Globally, about 87% of the 700 million doses dispensed went to wealthy nations. While 1 in 4 inhabitants there are already immunized, in the poor the proportion drops to one in more than 500.
In recent days, the United States and some European countries 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 delayed and restricted for fear of clotting problems.
Another concern: Poor countries rely on vaccines made by China and Russia, which some scientists believe provide less protection than those from 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 1 in 6 deaths in the world – hospitalizations and deaths have fallen, businesses reopen their doors and life returns to something similar to normal in various states. The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dropped to 576,000 last week, its post-COVID-19 low.
But progress has been uneven and new sources of infection have emerged in recent weeks, the most serious in Michigan. Still, deaths have fallen to an average of about 700 a day, a far cry from the record of around 3,400 in mid-January.
In Europe, countries are feeling the effects of a more contagious variant that first swept Britain, which has pushed the continent’s death toll from COVID-19 to over a million.
France’s intensive care units treat about 6,000 people with severe coronavirus pictures, a number that had not been seen since the first wave a year ago.
According to Dr. Marc Leone, director of the ICU of the North Hospital of Marseille, the exhausted front-line workers who were celebrated as heroes at the start of the pandemic now feel alone and cling to the hope that the new school closings and other restrictions help curb the spread in the coming weeks.
“There is exhaustion, more bad mood. You have to be careful because there are many conflicts, “he said. “We will do everything possible to spend these 15 days as best we can.”
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Goodman reported from Miami and Cheng from London. Associated Press journalists John Leicester in Paris and Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi contributed to this report.
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