Coronavirus: vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’ as global toll hits 4 million

Name: Global Covid-19 death toll hits 4 million as WHO says vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’
Uploaded: 2021-07-08T02:56:42.000Z
Duration: 3 min 51 s
Description: Global Covid-19 death toll hits 4 million as WHO says vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’

WHO chief says world is at ‘perilous point’ with death toll likely to be underestimated

Vaccination should be sped up and doses supplied to those who need them, according to health experts

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Covid-19 vaccines appear to be slowing the death rate, at least for now. Photo: Xinhua

Zhuang Pinghui

Published: 10:56am, 8 Jul 2021Updated: 8:48pm, 8 Jul 2021

The pandemic has cost Nairobi health care worker Mary Nanjala dearly. Her two sisters, brother and mother were all infected with Covid-19, and two close friends have died of complications from the disease.

“One friend was buried last Friday. This has left me very scared as the deaths came too near. We were very close friends,” Nanjala said. “I feel very sad as my friends were young and left behind children.”

As Africa and many other parts of the world battle fresh outbreaks, another grim milestone was reached on Thursday: more than 4 million people have now lost their lives to Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization.

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Global Covid-19 death toll hits 4 million as WHO says vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’

“The world is at a perilous point in this pandemic. We have just passed the tragic milestone of 4 million recorded Covid-19 deaths, which likely underestimates the overall toll,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director general, in a news briefing on Wednesday.

Health experts say the staggering death toll – about the same as the population of Los Angeles – underscores an urgent need to speed up immunisation to curb the spread of the virus, and to get vaccines to countries where access is limited. They also say more surveillance is needed of viruses with zoonotic spillover potential, meaning they could be transmitted from animals to humans, to avoid another catastrophe.

Eighteen months after Covid-19 and the virus that causes it were first identified in Wuhan, China, the situation globally remains fragile. More than 184.3 million people had been infected as of Wednesday, with an average of over 370,000 cases reported daily in the previous week.

Some countries, including Britain and Indonesia, are seeing a sharp rise in cases and hospital admissions, partly because more infectious strains of the virus are circulating.

Coronavirus: vaccines ‘surest way to prevent more deaths’ as global toll hits 4 million

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} WHO chief says world is at ‘perilous point’ with death toll likely to be underestimated Vaccination should be sped up and doses supplied to those who need them, according to health experts

WHO chief says world is at ‘perilous point’ with death toll likely to be underestimated

Vaccination should be sped up and doses supplied to those who need them, according to health experts