A million people have died from COVID-19 this year despite all the tools to prevent deaths from the virus, the World Health Organisation has said, calling it a “tragic milestone”.
Since first being detected in China at the end of 2019, nearly 6.45m deaths have been reported, with WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calling on governments worldwide to strengthen their vaccination efforts, reports News24.
“We cannot say we are learning to live with COVID-19 when one million people have died from it this year alone, when we are two and a half years into the pandemic and have all the tools necessary to prevent these deaths.
“More effort must be made by governments to vaccinate all health workers, older people and others at the highest risk, on the way to 70% vaccine coverage for the whole population.”
Tedros had wanted all countries to have jabbed 70% of their populations by the end of June, but 136 of them failed to reach the target: of those, 66 still have less than 40% coverage.
He said only 10 countries had less than 10% coverage, most of which were facing humanitarian emergencies.
“One-third of the world’s population remains unvaccinated, including two-thirds of health workers and three-quarters of older adults in low-income countries.”
‘Real human tragedy’
More than 593m cases have now been reported to the UN health agency.
The Omicron variant has accounted for 99% of virus samples collected in the past 30 days that have been sequenced and uploaded to the GISAID global science initiative. Of these, the BA.5 group of Omicron sub-variants remains globally dominant at 74%.
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