5m deaths highlight vaccine divides

WASHINGTON－Deaths related to COVID-19 surpassed 5 million worldwide on Friday, according to a Reuters tally, with unvaccinated people particularly at risk from the virulent Delta strain.

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 the Reuters analysis.

An average of 8,000 deaths was reported daily across the world for the last week in the Reuters tally, or around five deaths every minute. However, the global death rate has been slowing in recent weeks.

There has been an increasing focus 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 the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data, an information-gathering project backed by a charity in Britain.

The World Health Organization last week said its COVAX distribution program would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.

Co-led by the world health agency, COVAX has since January largely allocated doses proportionally among its 140-plus beneficiary states according to population size.

"For the October supply we designed a different methodology, only covering participants with low sources of supply," Mariangela Simao, the WHO's assistant director-general for access to vaccines, said in a recording of a conference presentation posted on the agency's website last week.

The US, which has been battling vaccine misinformation that has caused about a third of the population to avoid inoculations, surpassed 700,000 deaths late on Friday, the highest toll of any country. The figure is roughly equivalent to the population of the nation's capital Washington.

'Painful milestone'

US President Joe Biden commented on "the painful milestone" on Saturday. In a statement, he said "the astonishing death toll is yet another reminder of just how important it is to get vaccinated".

Infections and hospitalizations in the US have been trending lower, but health officials are bracing for a possible resurgence as cooler weather forces more activities indoors.

The deaths milestone is deeply frustrating to doctors, public health officials and other people who watched a pandemic that had been easing earlier in the summer take a dark turn.

Tens of millions of people in the US have refused to get vaccinated, allowing the highly contagious Delta variant to tear through the country and send the death toll from 600,000 to 700,000 in three and a half months.

Florida suffered by far the most deaths of any state during that period, with the virus killing about 17,000 residents since the middle of June. Texas was second with 13,000 deaths.

The two states account for 15 percent of the country's population, but more than 30 percent of the nation's deaths since the nation crossed the threshold of 600,000 fatalities.

In Russia, authorities reported 887 coronavirus-related deaths on Friday, the most for a single day since the pandemic began. Nearly 33 percent of those Russians eligible for a vaccine have received a first dose.

As a region, South America has the highest death toll in the world, accounting for 21 percent of all reported deaths. In North America and Eastern Europe, the virus was responsible for more than 14 percent of all fatalities during the pandemic, Reuters reported.

In an encouraging trend, India, one of the first countries to be ravaged by the Delta variant, has gone from an average of 4,000 deaths a day to fewer than 300 as its vaccination campaign gains momentum.

About 47 percent of vaccine-eligible Indians have received a first shot, with officials administering around 7,896,950 doses a day over the last-reported week, a Reuters analysis of the Our World in Data figures showed.

The Delta variant is now the dominant strain around the globe and has been reported in 187 of the 194 countries participating in the WHO.

Agencies - Xinhua