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The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus has dwarfed one million, nine months after a crisis that has devastated the global economy, tested the resolve of world leaders, pitted science with politics and forced crowds. to change the way they live, learn and work.
“It is not just a number. They are human beings. They are people we love, “said Dr. Howard Markel, a professor of medical history at the University of Michigan who has advised US government officials on how to contain pandemics and lost his 84-year-old mother to the cause. of the Covid-19 in February.
“They are our brothers, our sisters. They are people we know, ”she added. “And if you don’t have that human factor in your face, it’s very easy to make it abstract.”
The grim landmark, recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is larger than the population of Jerusalem or Austin, Texas. It is two and a half of the sea of humanity that was in Woodstock in 1969. It is more than four times the death toll in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
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Even then, the figure is almost certainly a very low count due to inadequate or inconsistent testing and reporting and suspected concealment by some countries.
And the number keeps increasing. Every day about 5,000 deaths are reported on average. Parts of Europe are being hit by a second wave, and experts fear the same fate may await the United States, which accounts for about 205,000 deaths, or one in five worldwide. That is far more than in any other country, despite America’s wealth and medical resources.
“I can understand why … the numbers are losing their shocking power, but I still think it’s really important that we understand how big these numbers really are,” said Mark Honigsbaum, author of The century of the pandemic: one hundred years of panic, hysteria and arrogance.
The global toll includes people like Joginder Chaudhary, who was the pride of his parents, raised on what little they earned cultivating a half-acre plot in central India to become the first doctor in his village.
Uncredited / AP
Joginder Chaudhary, left, and his friend volunteer at a women’s medical camp.
After the virus killed 27-year-old Chaudhary in late July, his mother wept inconsolably. With her son gone, Premlata Chaudhary said, how could she go on living?
Three weeks later, on August 18, the virus also took his life. In all, it has killed more than 95,000 in India.
“This pandemic has ruined my family,” said the young doctor’s father, Rajendra Chaudhary. “All our aspirations, our dreams, everything is over.”
When the virus swept through cemeteries in the Italian province of Bergamo last spring, Reverend Mario Carminati opened his church to the dead, lining 80 coffins in the central aisle. After an army convoy took them to a crematorium, another 80 arrived. Then 80 more.
Antonio Calanni / AP
Don Marcello Crotti, left, blesses the coffins with Don Mario Carminati in the church of San Giuseppe in Italy.
Finally, the crisis receded and the world’s attention moved on. But the clutches of the pandemic endure. In August, Carminati buried her 34-year-old nephew.
“This should give us all thought. The problem is that we believe that we are all immortal, ”said the priest.
The virus first appeared in late 2019 in hospitalized patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first death was reported on January 11. When authorities closed the city nearly two weeks later, millions of travelers had come and gone. China’s government has been criticized for not doing enough to alert other countries to the threat.
Government leaders from countries such as Germany, South Korea, and New Zealand worked effectively to contain it. Others, such as US President Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, dismissed the seriousness of the threat and the guidance of scientists, even as hospitals filled with seriously ill patients.
Jae C. Hong / AP
A doctor treats a 71-year-old Covid-19 patient at St. Jude Medical Center in California.
Brazil has recorded the second highest number of deaths after the United States, with around 142,000. India ranks third and Mexico fourth, with more than 76,000.
The virus has forced trade-offs between security and financial well-being. The decisions made have left millions of people vulnerable, especially the poor, minorities and the elderly.
With so many deaths out of sight in hospital wards and clustered on the margins of society, the landmark recalls the grim pronouncement often attributed to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin: one death is a tragedy, millions of deaths are one. statistics.
The one million death toll from the pandemic in such a limited time rivals some of the gravest threats to public health, past and present.
Other pens / AP
Cemetery workers in protective clothing bury three Covid-19 victims in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
It exceeds the annual deaths from AIDS, which last year killed about 690,000 people worldwide. The death toll from the virus is approaching 1.5 million annual deaths from tuberculosis worldwide, which routinely kills more people than any other infectious disease.
But “Covid’s control over humanity is incomparably greater than the control over other causes of death,” said Lawrence Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown University in the United States. He pointed to unemployment, poverty and despair caused by the pandemic and deaths from thousands of other diseases that have not been treated.
Despite its lethality, the virus has claimed far fewer lives than the so-called Spanish flu, which killed between 40 and 50 million people worldwide in two years, just over a century ago.
That pandemic occurred before scientists had microscopes powerful enough to identify the enemy or the antibiotics that could treat the bacterial pneumonia that killed most of the victims. It also followed a very different course.
Anupam Nath / AP
A woman cries after glimpsing the body of her husband, a Covid-19 victim, at a cremation site in Gauhati, India.
In the United States, for example, the Spanish flu killed about 675,000 people. But most of those deaths did not occur until a second wave occurred during the winter of 1918-19.
So far, the disease has left only a slight footprint in Africa, far short of early models that predicted thousands more deaths.
But cases have recently increased in countries like Britain, Spain, Russia and Israel. In the United States, the return of students to college campuses has sparked new outbreaks.
With the approval and distribution of a vaccine likely months away and winter approaching in the northern hemisphere, the death toll will continue to rise.
“We are only at the beginning of this. We will see many more weeks before this pandemic than we have had before, ”said Gostin.
