Three million lives: That is roughly equivalent to losing
the population of Berlin, Chicago or Taipei. The scale is so staggering that it
sometimes begins to feel real only in places like graveyards.
اضافة اعلان
The world’s COVID-19 death toll surpassed 3 million
Saturday, according to a New York Times database. More than 100,000 people have
died of COVID-19 in France. The death rate is inching up in Michigan. Morgues
in some Indian cities are overflowing with corpses.
And as the United States and other rich nations race to
vaccinate their populations, new hot spots have emerged in parts of Asia,
Eastern Europe and Latin America.
The global pace of deaths is accelerating, too. After the
coronavirus emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the pandemic claimed 1
million lives in nine months. It took another four months to kill its second
million, and just three months to kill a million more.
“We are running out of space,” Mohammed Shamin, a
gravedigger in New Delhi’s largest Muslim cemetery, said Saturday. “If we don’t
get more space, you will soon see dead bodies rotting in the streets.”
The deaths are the most tragic aspect of the pandemic, but
they aren’t the only cost.
Many millions more have been sickened by the virus, some
with effects that may last for years or even a lifetime. Livelihoods have been
ruined. Global work and travel have been disrupted in profound and potentially
long-lasting ways.
The official toll almost certainly does not account for all
the pandemic-related deaths in the world. Some of those deaths may have been
mistakenly attributed to other causes, like flu or pneumonia, while others have
died as a result of the vast disruptions of life.
The pandemic has also sharpened inequalities that were hard
to bear even in regular times.
Nanthana Chobcheun, 67, who works at a wet market in the
eastern Thai city of Bangsaen, said her income had fallen by half since the
coronavirus emerged. But she cannot afford to stop working, she added, even as
Thailand’s caseload rises.
“Young people, rich people are enjoying their nightlife,
even when there’s a contagious disease, and gathering without a care in the
world,” Nanthana, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, said at an open-air
market Saturday.
“For us little people, and especially old people like me,
it’s different,” she added, sitting on a stool amid piles of dried fish.
Some parts of the world may be turning the corner. The
United States and Britain have seen death rates drop in recent weeks as they
have rolled out aggressive vaccination programs. In Israel, 56 percent of the
population had been fully vaccinated as of Friday, according to a
New York Times tracker.
At the same time, new outbreaks are still cropping up
persistently in rich countries. That has shocked millions of people — from
Madrid to Los Angeles — who once expected regular life to resume in tandem with
vaccine rollouts.
In France, which is in the throes of a third national
lockdown, a deep sense of fatigue and frustration has taken root over a
seemingly endless cycle of coronavirus restrictions. The third lockdown has
limited outdoor activities, forced nonessential shops to close, banned travel
between regions and shut schools for a month.
Japan, which lifted a state of emergency less than a month
ago and plans to host the Olympics this summer, on Friday said it would tighten
restrictions in Tokyo and other cities to prevent a surge of infections from
snowballing into a fourth wave.
And in the United States, dangerous variants are driving new
outbreaks, even though new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have declined
from their January peaks. Michigan, the worst-hit state, is reporting an
average of about 50 deaths a day, twice as many as two weeks ago, along with
7,800 or so new cases.
The United States and parts of Western Europe bore the brunt
of deaths for the first year of the pandemic. Now, the hot spots for fatalities
are in regions like Eastern Europe, South Asia and Latin America.
In Brazil, Latin America’s largest country, the virus has
taken more than 368,000 lives and is killing people at a record rate of about
2,900 per day. Vaccinations are slow, variants are rampant and hospitals are
overloaded. In Mexico, where COVID-19 has killed more than 211,000 people, only
about 1 in 10 people in the country have received a vaccine.
“It’s so hard for a lot of us,” said Ivan Mena Álvarez, a
piñata maker in Mexico City who has lost 11 members of his extended family to
the virus. “It just never crossed your mind that there would be so many dead in
so little time.”
While richer countries have essentially hoarded vaccines,
poorer ones are scrambling desperately for doses.
Safety worries about the AstraZeneca and Johnson &
Johnson vaccines, based on a small number of people who developed problems with
blood clotting, have also exacerbated vaccine hesitancy around the world — a
trend that threatens to prolong the pandemic and subvert nascent vaccination
drives.
Most countries are not even close to achieving herd
immunity, the point where enough people are immune to the coronavirus that it
can no longer spread through a population.
In India, where the death toll has surpassed 175,000, more
than 114 million people had received a first dose of a COVID vaccine as of
Friday. But that is only 7.4 percent of the population.
The pandemic has undone decades of economic progress in
India. Now, the country of 1.3 billion people is recording an average of about
1,000 deaths a day as a huge outbreak flares in the western state of
Maharashtra, which is home to Mumbai. India reported 1,341 deaths Saturday
alone, along with nearly a quarter of a million new cases.
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