Deaths due to pandemic of the new coronavirus exceeded 4 million globally yesterday (Thursday), according to a Reuters news agency count, at a time when many of the world's countries are struggling to obtain enough vaccines to immunize their populations against COVID-19.
Although the numbers of cases of SARS-CoV-2 and deaths due to COVID-19 are on the decline in countries such as the USA and the UK, many countries are still facing lack of vaccines while the Delta variant becomes the dominant one at the international level.
It was more than a year before the official global death toll from the pandemic reached 2 million; but in this added another two million deaths in just 166 days, according to the Reuters analysis.
The five countries with the highest death toll - the US, Brazil, India, Russia and Mexico - have accounted for almost 50% of the world's deaths. Peru, Hungary, Bosnia, the Czech Republic and Gibraltar record the highest mortality rates in proportion to their populations.
Latin American and Caribbean countries are facing the worst outbreak of the pandemic since March, with 43 out of 100 infections in the world recorded in this region, according to Reuters' analysis. Last week, the nine countries in the top ten with the most deaths per capita due to COVID-19 were Latin American countries.
Hospitals in Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay are admitting patients between the ages of 25 and 40 years, as the trend towards younger and younger patients continues.
In San Paulo, Brazil, 80% of people hospitalised in intensive care units (ICUs) are patients with COVID-19.
The rapid increase in infections and deaths are again putting increasing pressure on crematoria and cemeteries in many countries, with many rushing to open new graves.
India and Brazil report the most deaths on a daily basis in the last week. The former is finding it difficult to proceed with the cremation of the bodies of the victims, in the latter there is no more space in the cemeteries. India accounts for one in three deaths in the world due to COVID-19 per day, according to Reuters data.
Many public health experts consider official global accounts to be grossly underestimated. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated last month that in reality the number of victims is double to triple.
Last week, the federal state of Bihar in India dramatically revised the official death toll of the pandemic by thousands of deaths, which seemed to confirm experts who have long stressed that in reality the Asian country has suffered far greater losses than the authorities acknowledge.
As lower and middle-income countries struggle to immunise their populations due to a shortage of vaccine doses, calls are being made for richer countries to share their stocks to bring the pandemic under control.
The G7 has pledged to donate at least 1 billion doses of vaccines by mid-2022 to poorer countries.
