Hospitals in crisis mode are starting to see some relief as COVID case numbers driven by a summer surge of the delta variant start to decrease, but the US has reached its “latest heartbreaking pandemic milestone” nonetheless.
The confirmed coronavirus death toll has now topped 700,000 on Friday, just over a year and a half into the pandemic, and despite the wide availability of vaccines, reports ABC News. It is the unvaccinated population that is serving as a sort of “kindling” for variants – and this could eventually lead to a variant that’s significantly resistant to the vaccines.
The Associated Press notes the number of deaths to date is larger than the population of Boston, and the frustration being felt by medical professionals and public health officials is palpable. About 117 million Americans have yet to be vaccinated, including 70 million who are now eligible to get the shot.
Despite the data showing encouraging signs of decline in new cases of the coronavirus, approximately 1,500 Americans are dying from the virus every day, according to federal data.
Jeffrey Shaman, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, along with others, was very concerned with how severe the pandemic might prove to be when it first started in 2020.
“My team and I could see very early on that this pathogen had the potential to kill this many people in the U.S. … I did not anticipate just how fractious the response would be, how leaders would not be able to or interested in unifying the country to come together and overcome political differences in order to combat the virus,” Shaman said.
“I’m saddened this did not happen. I think if it had, fewer people would have died and the economic consequences of the pandemic would also have been lessened.”
Staggering global milestone is reached
Johns Hopkins figures show that the number of deaths worldwide still hovers around 4.8 million, however, a Reuters tally says the planet as a whole reached its own grim milestone on Friday: with more than 5 million dead worldwide.
It took more than a year for the global death toll to reach the first 2.5 million, but just eight months to reach the second. And this shows the wide disparities in vaccination rates between rich and poor nations, while more than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.
In an effort to rectify the disparities in vaccination rates, the World Health Organization (WHO) this week said its COVAX distribution program would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.
“For the October supply we designed a different methodology, only covering participants with low sources of supply,” Mariangela Simao, WHO Assistant Director-General for Access to Vaccines, said in a recording of a conference presentation last week posted on the WHO’s website.
