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The covid-19 pandemic, which originated at the end of 2019 in China and spread throughout the world, surpassed the threshold of one million deaths on Monday, according to an AFP count established from official sources.
In total, 1,000,009 deaths were officially confirmed in the world, out of a total of 33,018,877 cases detected, while 22,640,048 people were healed, according to the authorities.
Drastic measures taken by many countries have so far failed to curb the pandemic, which is causing disastrous economic consequences and fueling political divisions.
You can read: 712 new cases and 13 deaths from covid-19 confirmed in the Valley this Sunday
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday that deaths from covid-19 could double and reach two million if measures are not maintained to prevent the spread of the virus.
The regions most affected in number of deaths are Latin America and the Caribbean (341,032 deaths, out of 9,190,683 cases), Europe (229,945; 5,273,943) and the United States and Canada (214,031; 7,258,663).
Not in my worst nightmares
The world has engraved on its retinas the images of mass graves in Brazil, a makeshift morgue in the Ice Palace in Madrid and refrigerated trucks with corpses in the streets of New York.
Beyond the coldness of the figures, the most devastating consequence is the void left by those who died, since many duels had to be done without the relatives being able to accompany the victim in the final stage of the disease, or even say goodbye to her once dead, as a result of sanitary measures.
“Not in my worst nightmares did I imagine that this was going to happen to me,” says Mónica, 45, when she remembers that she had to certify with her signature that the body that was about to be cremated was that of her father, Oscar Farías, who succumbed in Buenos Aires on April 27 at the age of 81, without even having seen the coffin.
On January 11, China officially registered the first death from Sars-CoV-2, the virus responsible for covid-19, which initially spread rapidly in the province of Wuhan, where it was detected in December.
In a month, China registered more than 1,000 deaths, a more serious toll than that caused by SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which circulated in Asia in 2002-2003 and was fatal for 774 people.
As of February, the virus began to cause deaths outside of China and its acceleration was exponential, first in Europe, which is now seeing a second wave arrive, and then in the American continent, where the numbers of cases and deaths have remained high since June.
The government response was drastic in the vast majority of cases. In mid-April, about 60% of the world’s population, about 4.5 billion people, was affected by some type of confinement.
The economic consequences of this confinement, unprecedented in history, reached all corners of the planet.
Closed shops, deserted streets, empty airports, a shortage of supply in markets: the world had not experienced something similar.
In June, the International Monetary Fund estimated that GDP would contract by 4.9% in 2020.
In one year, the airline industry has lost 92% of its flight volume.
Major sporting events were interrupted, and the Tokyo Olympics postponed until 2021, without being absolutely certain that they can be held.
That great void
Patrick Vogt, a doctor from Mulhouse, a city in eastern France that became the main focus in that country in March, recalls the terrible moment when he realized that the coronavirus was everywhere.
Other doctors began to fall ill, some died. It was not just a flu, as they had believed, but a “deadly disease.”
In Asia, where fewer than 100 deaths were recorded per day until mid-April, the rise has been continuous since then, mainly due to the situation in India.
Worldwide, the curve has been on a “plateau” since the beginning of June, with some 5,000 deaths a day according to official figures.
For Franklin Américo Rivera, a 52-year-old Salvadoran photojournalist, and his family the nightmare began on June 22 with pharyngotonsillitis and, shortly after, a urinary infection.
“We cannot describe that great void,” says his sister Geraldina Juárez. “She couldn’t walk very much, so she spent the day in her chair, which she had placed in the yard,” and one night a shortage of ambulances, a storm and saturation of the emergency system took care of the rest.
Various laboratories around the world are immersed in the manufacture of a vaccine. On Thursday, US biotech group Novavax announced that it has launched a final-phase clinical trial for its potential immunization in the UK.
It is the 11th experimental vaccine in the world to enter the final phase of clinical trials.
The one million death toll from the new coronavirus pandemic is much higher than that of other recent viruses, such as influenza A (H1N1) called “swine” which in 2009 officially caused 18,500 deaths, but less than the terrible “Spanish flu “from a century ago.
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. .
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