As the world enters the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global death toll is about to hit 6 million, indicating that humanity's battle against the dreaded virus continues.
Some countries, including the United States, reported a downward trend in COVID-19 infections in recent weeks, prompting the relaxing of pandemic measures and re-opening of businesses. However, the death toll recorded by Johns Hopkins University at 5,996,882 as of Sunday morning and was expected to pass the 6 million mark soon. While according to the World Health Organization's website, there have been 440,807,756 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,978,096 deaths, while a total of 10,704,043,684 vaccine doses have been administered worldwide.
As it adheres to mainland China's "zero-COVID" strategy, Hong Kong is testing its entire population of 7.5 million people three times this month, but the number of deaths remains high, per NBC News.
While death rates in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other Eastern European nations stay high, the region has seen over 1 million refugees arrive from the war-torn Ukraine, which has low vaccination numbers and high rates of infections and mortality.
Infections in the United Kingdom have decreased since an omicron-driven spike in December but are still high. All restrictions, including mask mandates and the necessity that all who test positive isolate at home, have been repealed in England.
The African continent's lower death toll, at around 250,000, is assumed to be due to underreporting, as well as a population that is predominantly young and less mobile.
The World Health Organization reported this week that there had been more than 445 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, with new weekly cases dropping in all regions except the Western Pacific, including China, Japan, and South Korea, as Time reported.
After the pandemic began in early 2020, it took the world seven months to register the first million deaths due to the COVID-19 virus. Another million people perished four months later, and 1 million people died every three months afterward until the death toll reached 5 million at the end of October.
Undercounted Cases
However, months ago, it was expected that the death toll would hit 6 million worldwide, considering that there are difficulties in keeping records and testing in different countries, which caused disparities in the numbers. Excess deaths were also documented as a result of the pandemic, but not directly from COVID-19 infections, such as persons who died of preventable conditions but were unable to receive treatment because hospitals were in total capacity.
According to Tikki Pang, co-Chair of the Pacific Immunization Coalition, the death rates across the globe are still highest among unvaccinated individuals, citing Hong Kong's case as an example. She said the huge majority of the fatalities and severe cases are "in the unvaccinated, vulnerable segment of the population."
US Cases Declining But Number of Deaths is Almost 1 Million
And despite its wealth and vaccine availability, the United States is nearing 1 million reported deaths on its own COVID-19 is shifting from pandemic to endemic. US officials say the country has the world's highest official death toll, but the numbers have been declining in recent months.
Based on WHO figures, the United States has reported 78,428,884 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 947,625 deaths. While vaccine doses administered, have reached 537,567,013.
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