(p. A13) Though many global coronavirus trends are rapidly improving as countries emerge from surges driven by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, the grimmest metric hit a tragic milestone on Monday [March 7, 2022].
The number of known Covid-19 deaths around the world surpassed six million, according to data from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
“Six million is really unfathomable,” said Beth Blauer, the data leader for the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins. “These are real lives.”
. . .
Public health experts agree that six million is a vast undercount and that the true devastation will never be precisely known. In Yemen, where a civil war has been raging for years, the government has reported only 2,100 deaths since the start of the pandemic while its population of 30 million is 99 percent unvaccinated.
“There’s a lot that we don’t know in places that don’t necessarily have the same infrastructure for fundamentally understanding the pandemic and reporting,” Dr. Blauer said.
. . .
. . . the United States, with ample vaccine supply, has suffered the highest known total — more than 950,000 deaths — and failed to inoculate as much of its population as other wealthy nations.
. . .
. . . stark vaccination disparities between countries remain, leaving the entire world vulnerable to the threat of a new, deadly variant. Vaccination rates continue to lag in low-income countries, where only 14 percent of the population has received at least one dose of a vaccine. In high- and upper-middle-income countries, 79 percent of the population has received at least one dose.
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(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 7, 2022, and has the title “The pandemic’s official global toll surpasses 6 million known virus deaths.”)