Global death toll from coronavirus tops 1 million
- Bleak milestone, recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Jerusalem and double the number of annual malaria deaths
- The United States has the highest death toll in the world with 205,000 fatalities
“It’s not just a number. It’s human beings. It’s people we love,” said Dr Howard Markel, a professor of medical history at the University of Michigan who has advised government officials on containing pandemics and lost his 84-year-old mother to Covid-19 in February.
“It’s our brothers, our sisters. It’s people we know,” he added. “And if you don’t have that human factor right in your face, it’s very easy to make it abstract.”
The bleak milestone, recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Jerusalem or Austin, Texas. It is 2 1/2 times the sea of humanity that was at Woodstock in 1969. It is more than four times the number killed in the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and is double the number of people who die annually from malaria.
Even then, the figure is almost certainly a vast undercount because of inadequate or inconsistent testing and reporting and suspected concealment by some countries.
“Our world has reached an agonising milestone,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “It’s a mind-numbing figure. Yet we must never lose sight of each and every individual life. They were fathers and mothers, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues.”
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the world had to unite to fight the virus. “History will judge us on the decisions we do and don’t make in the months ahead,” he said.