COVID-19 Global death toll from food 1M

By ADAM GELLER and RISHABHR.JAIN
Associated Press

New Delhi-Coronavirus kills more than a million people worldwide, threatens in nine months, destroys the global economy, tests the determination of world leaders, defeats science in politics, It has made many people change their lives, learning and working styles. ..

“It’s not just numbers, it’s humans, it’s the people we love,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of medical history at the University of Michigan who advised government officials on the containment of a pandemic and lost his 84-year-old mother. .. To COVID-19 in February.

“It’s our brother, our sister. It’s the people we know,” he added. “And if that ergonomics isn’t right for your face, it’s very easy to abstract it.”

The dark milestones recorded on Monday in the United States by Johns Hopkins University are larger than the population in Jerusalem or Austin, Texas. It is 2.5 times larger than the human sea that was in Woodstock in 1969. More than four times the number killed by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Still, this number is arguably significantly underestimated due to inadequate or inconsistent testing and reporting in some countries and suspected concealment.

And that number continues to grow. An average of nearly 5,000 deaths are reported daily. Part of Europe has been hit by a new outbreak, and experts are afraid of a second wave in the United States. That’s about 205,000 dead, or one in five in the world. Despite America’s wealth and medical resources, it is far more than any other country.

“I understand why the numbers are losing their shocking power, but I think it’s very important to understand how big these numbers really are,” said Pandemic Century: A Hundred Years of Panic. Said Mark Honigsbaum, the author of. , Hysteria and Habris. “

Global victims include people like Joginder Chaudary, who was the greatest pride of their parents, who grew up on a small income earned by cultivating half acres of land in central India and villages. Became the first doctor from.

His mother cried badly after the virus killed 27-year-old Chaudhary in late July. With his son gone, Premurata Chaudary wondered how he could stay alive. Three weeks later, on August 18, the virus also killed her. Overall, it killed more than 96,000 people in India.

“This pandemic has ruined my family,” said Rajendra Chaudary, the father of a young doctor. “All our desires, our dreams, everything is over.”

When the virus struck a cemetery in the province of Bergamo, Italy last spring, Rev. Mario Carminati opened the church to the dead and lined 80 caskets in the central corridor. An additional 80 arrived after the military fleet carried them to the crematorium. Then another 80.

Eventually, the crisis receded and the world’s attention increased. However, grasping the pandemic is tolerable. In August, Karminati buried his 34-year-old nephew.

“This should be reflected in all of us. The problem is that we all think immortal,” said the priest.

The virus first appeared in patients admitted to Wuhan, China in late 2019, with the first reported death on January 11. The Chinese government has been criticized for not doing enough to warn other countries of the threat.

Brazil has the second highest death toll after the United States, at around 142,000. India is third and Mexico is fourth, with over 76,000.

The virus has forced a trade-off between security and financial well-being. The choices made make millions of people, especially the poor, minorities and the elderly vulnerable.

Milestones are reminiscent of the harsh remarks often attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, as many of the deaths beyond sight in the ward are concentrated on social boundaries. The death of one is a tragedy. Millions of deaths are statistics.

Pandemic casualties, which killed one million people in such a limited amount of time, are comparable to some of the most serious threats to public health in the past and present.

This is more than the annual death toll from AIDS, which killed about 690,000 people worldwide last year. The virus victims are approaching the worldwide death of 1.5 million people each year from tuberculosis, which regularly kills more people than any other infectious disease.

However, Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, said, “COVID’s grip on humankind is unmatched by any other cause of death.” He mentioned unemployment, poverty, despair, and death from a myriad of untreated illnesses caused by the pandemic.

Due to its all-lethal nature, the virus killed far less than the so-called Spanish flu, which killed an estimated 40 to 50 million people worldwide in two years, just a century ago.

The pandemic happened before scientists got a microscope powerful enough to identify the enemy and antibiotics that could treat bacterial pneumonia, which killed most of the victims. In the United States, the Spanish flu killed about 675,000 people. However, most of those deaths did not come until the second wave struck in the winter of 1918-19.

So far, the disease has left only a small footprint in Africa and has been quite shy about the early modeling that predicted thousands of deaths.

However, the number of incidents has increased rapidly in countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Russia and Israel recently. In the United States, the return of students to college campuses has sparked a new outbreak. Vaccine approval and distribution is probably still months away, and winter is approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, and prices will continue to rise.

“We are just the beginning of this. Much more weeks will be seen before this pandemic than we had behind us,” Gostin said.