Global death toll crosses 5m: Reuters

LONDON • Worldwide deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic have crossed five million, according to a Reuters tally. However, Johns Hopkins University and World Health Organisation (WHO) data indicates that the grim milestone is likely to be surpassed only in the coming weeks.

Johns Hopkins University's Centre for Systems Science and Engineering pegged the deaths significantly lower, at 4,791,939 as at 2pm yesterday. The World Health Organisation gave the number of lives that have been lost so far in the pandemic at 4,777,503.

The death estimate from Reuters comes amid fresh waves of sickness caused by the Delta variant that have battered unvaccinated people. The variant has exposed the wide disparities in vaccination rates between rich and poor nations, and the upshot of vaccine hesitancy in some Western nations.

More than half of all global deaths reported on a seven-day average were in the United States, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and India.

While it took just over a year for the Covid-19 death toll to hit 2.5 million, the next 2.5 million deaths were recorded in just under eight months, according to Reuters' analysis. An average of 8,000 deaths were reported daily across the world over the past week, or around five deaths every minute. However, the global death rate has been slowing in recent weeks.

There has been increasing focus in recent days on getting vaccines to poorer nations, where many people are yet to receive a first dose, even as their richer counterparts have begun giving booster shots.

More than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data. The WHO last week said its Covax distribution programme would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.

REUTERS