By EBUKA ONYEJI
Sunday September 27, 2020
The U.S. hit a tragic milestone Tuesday, recording more than 200,000 coronavirus deaths. Here, Chris Duncan, whose 75-year-old mother, Constance, died from COVID-19 on her birthday, visits a COVID Memorial Project installation of 20,000 U.S. flags on the National Mall. The flags are on the grounds of the Washington Monument, facing the White House. Win McNamee/Getty Images
The number of deaths from coronavirus globally has crossed the million threshold, with more than 1,000,502 deaths recorded as of Sunday evening, according to worldometer.info.
That includes over 209,000 deaths in the United States, which has lost more people to COVID-19 than any other country, and more than twice as India, the next most impacted country with about 95,000 dead.
The total coronavirus infections globally has also crossed 33 million with the 33,192,997 cases reported as of Sunday evening, according to the worldometer.info data.
Worst still, health experts say there are likely far more cases out there that have not been confirmed
On Saturday morning, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned that the global coronavirus death toll could hit two million before an effective vaccine is widely used.
The virus appears to be spreading much faster in India than any other country, with the Asian country recording more than 80,000 daily infections in the past week.
Meanwhile, over 24 million of the infected people have recovered after treatment worldwide.
Troubling uptick in number of deaths
The world hit the one million threshold barely six months after the number of people killed worldwide by the coronavirus reached 3,000 in early March. This shows how deadly the disease can be if not properly managed.
The death tally reached 20,000 in late March and crossed half a million on June 28. About 20 days after, 100,000 more deaths were recorded and on Sunday morning, the toll reached 995,000.
Nearly one-quarter of those deaths are accounted for by the U.S.
The U.S. reports approximately 5,000 deaths each week, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the true number of infections and fatalities could be far higher, giving the varied ways in which countries conduct tests and report COVID-19, the CNN reported.
The Americas still account for more than half of all fatalities worldwide owing to high death counts in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.
An average of more than 5,000 people die each day from COVID-19, according to Reuters calculations based on data from the last two weeks.
Africa
More than 35,000 people have died from coronavirus complications in Africa since Egypt became the first country in the continent to confirm a coronavirus case about seven months ago, data from Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) revealed.
The death toll includes the former president of the Republic of the Congo, Jacques Yhombi-Opango; Somalia’s former prime minister Nur Hassan Hussein; Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s chief of staff, Abba Kyari and dozens of health officials.
More than 1.4 million infections have been found in the continent of over a billion people thus far.
WHO officials said the statistics are likely to significantly underestimate the true number of cases in Africa, raising concerns that African countries were not conducting enough tests.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has reported over 58,000 infections leading to the death of over a thousand people.