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On January 11, China officially registered the first death from coronavirus. Only eight months after that date, the world is getting closer and closer to the threshold of one million deaths as a result of covid-19.
Here is a brief account of the X-ray of the disease so far this 2020.
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The way how it has evolved?
Sars-CoV-2, the virus responsible for covid-19, initially spread rapidly in China, particularly in Wuhan province, where it was detected in December.
In a month, China registered more than a thousand deaths, a more serious balance than that left by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which circulated in Asia in 2002-2003 and was fatal to 774 people.
Starting in February, the virus began to circulate rapidly outside of China. The Philippines registered its first death on February 2; Hong Kong, two days later; Japan and France follow on February 13 and 14.
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In just eight days, from February 11 to 19, a thousand more deaths were announced, mainly in China. The spread of the virus accelerated.
What happened after the pandemic was declared?
On March 11, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new coronavirus a “pandemic”, 30 countries and territories registered 4,500 deaths, two thirds of them in China.
Italy, which added 800 deaths at the time, and Iran (300) see a rapid increase in cases of infections and deaths. Until mid-April, the number of daily deaths recorded in Europe and the United States continued to increase.
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In the second week of April, the Old Continent registered more than 4,000 deaths per day on average and the United States, 2,700. Five months later, the United States became the worst hit country in death toll, with more than 200,000.
Globally, the deadliest week was recorded from April 13 to 19. More than 7,400 deaths from the virus were officially announced daily and the total worldwide reached almost 170,000 deaths, double the figure on March 31.
And Latin America?
In June, the epicenter of the pandemic moved to the Latin American and Caribbean region. Since July 15, for a month, the region had an average of 2,500 deaths per day, a figure that slowly decreased from August 15 to 1,900 daily deaths in the third week of September.
The United States registered almost 7 million infections this Friday at noon, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
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Brazil, after the United States, is the country that registers the highest number of deaths from coronavirus, with more than 138,000. In relation to their population, Peru (958 deaths per million inhabitants), Bolivia (659), Brazil (650), Chile (644) and Ecuador (630) are among the 10 most affected countries in the world, along with Belgium ( 859) and Spain (661).
What does the second wave look like?
In Asia, where fewer than 100 deaths were recorded per day until mid-April, the rise has been continuous since then. Since July 20, the region has exceeded 1,000 deaths almost daily and has about at 1,500, mainly due to the situation in India, which adds 90,000 deaths.
Concern about a second wave of the pandemic is growing in Europe. The region this week registered a 20% increase in cases compared to the previous week. Deaths are also on the rise (614, +28%).
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The Middle East experienced a peak of deaths during the summer (boreal) and then a slight decrease. But the situation worsened and last week it added 330 deaths a day on average, 18% more than the previous one.
The African continent, officially the least affected by the pandemic, has registered fewer and fewer deaths since August (less than 200 deaths per day in mid-September).
Oceania, where the number of deaths per day never averaged more than 20 people, is now below ten. Worldwide, the curve has been on a “plateau” since the beginning of June, with some 5,000 deaths a day according to official figures.
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The ravages of the coronavirus compared to other viruses
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The number of victims of the new coronavirus pandemic has caused many more deaths than other recent viruses, but far fewer than those of the Spanish flu of a century ago.
The count, which only includes officially counted deaths, is temporary as the pandemic continues. But it is a benchmark to compare its ravages with that of other viruses, both current and past.
21st century virus
The death toll from Sars-Cov-2 exceeds that of virus epidemics that appeared in the 21st century.
In 2009, the epidemic of influenza A (H1N1), called swine, was a pandemic alert. It officially caused 18,500 deaths. This balance was revised upwards by the medical journal The lancet, which estimates between 151,700 and 575,400 deaths.
Coronaviruses are a broad family of viruses that can cause illness.
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The SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic was caused by a virus that appeared in China. It was the first coronavirus to trigger global panic, but in total it caused 774 deaths in 2002-2003.
Flu epidemics
The balance of covid-19 is often compared to that of seasonal flu. “Globally, these annual epidemics are responsible for some 5 million serious cases and between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths“says the World Health Organization (WHO).
In the 20th century, two large influenza pandemics caused by new (non-seasonal) viruses, the 1957-58 pandemic, known as the Asian flu, and the 1968-70 pandemic, called the Hong Kong flu, each caused approximately one million dead, according to later counts.
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Globalization caused intense economic relations and people (and therefore also viruses) circulate more and much faster. If we go back further into the 20th century, the great flu of 1918-1919, known as the Spanish flu (also caused by a new virus), was a hecatomb: in three waves it caused an estimated total of 50 million deaths, according to data published at the beginning of the 2000s.
Tropical viruses
The death toll from the new coronavirus is already much higher than that of the fearsome Ebola, which dates back to 1976. The latest outbreak of the Ebola virus disease killed nearly 2,300 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) people between August 2018 and the end of June 2020.
If we add up all the Ebola epidemics for more than 40 years, the virus caused about 15,000 deaths, all of them in Africa. And that Ebola has a much higher mortality rate than that of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus: about 50% of the sick die and in some epidemics it rises to 90%, according to the WHO.
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But this virus is less contagious than other viral diseases: it is transmitted by direct contact and not through the air.
Other tropical viruses such as dengue or tropical flu, whose more severe variant can cause death, also have lower balances. This mosquito-borne infection has been progressing for 20 years and causes thousands of deaths annually (4,032 in 2015).
Other viral epidemics
HIV-AIDS, for which there is no effective vaccine decades after its appearance, caused many deaths between the years 1980 and 2000. Thanks to the generalization of antiretroviral therapies, the annual toll of people dying of AIDS fell from the peak 2004 (1.7 million).
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In 2019 there were 690,000 deaths, according to UNAIDS. AIDS, which can be treated but not cured, has killed nearly 33 million people since its onset.
For his part, hepatitis B and C viruses kill approximately 1.3 million people per year, especially in poor countries, from cirrhosis or liver cancer (900,000 deaths from hepatitis B and 400,000 from hepatitis C).
The above data were mainly obtained from WHO.
Read also
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– Wuhan vents after months of ‘suffocation’ by the coronavirus
