COVID-19 Death Toll Hits 2 Million Globally

By Mary Anne R. (staff@latinpost.com) First Posted: Jan 15, 2021 11:36 PM EST

Clinicians manually prone a COVID-19 patient in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre on January 7, 2021 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Alegre is a public institution and since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, it has treated 1,400 critically ill patients at the Intensive Care Unit. To meet the demand, they had to install 105 new beds and temporarily hire 775 professionals, in addition to recruiting volunteers. Brazil has registered over 7.8 million confirmed cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll from COVID-19 is nearing 200,000, the second highest in the world. (Photo : Silvio Avila/Getty Images)

The global death toll from COVID-19 has crossed two million on Friday, which poses a huge problem to vaccine rollout.

Johns Hopkins University recorded the two millionth death just over a year after the COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, according to an Associated Press report.

The number of deaths is about equal to the population of Brussels, Mecca, Vienna, or Minsk. It is also almost equivalent to the entire state of Nebraska or the Cleveland metropolitan area.

Dr. Ashish Jha, a pandemic expert and dean of Brown University's School of Public Health, said there had been a terrible amount of death, despite the extraordinary work done by the scientific community.

In the United States, millions of citizens have already been given at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, immunization drive in some areas has barely taken flight, with many experts predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Mexico and Brazil, among others.

Countries like Iran, India, Brazil, and Mexico account together for about a quarter of the world's death toll. Israel Gomez, a Mexico City paramedic, lamented that people "have not understood that this is not a game, that this really exists."

Mexico COVID-19 Vaccine Program

Mexico became the first Latin American country on Thursday to launch a COVID-19 vaccination effort, which gives the nation hope after it has lost more than 120,000 people to the pandemic, Voice of America News reported.

Maria Irene Ramirez was among the first to receive a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Ramirez said it was the best gift that she received in 2020.

Other Latin American countries such as Chile will also start the vaccination programs of health care workers.

According to officials, Chile already received the first 10,000 doses of a 10 million-dose order of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in December last year.

Costa Rica has already started vaccinating residents against the disease last month. Health workers and the elderly were the first to receive jabs. Argentina, on the other hand, recently received about 300,000 doses of Sputnik V vaccine from Russia.

U.S. COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts

President-elect Joe Biden has called for a vast expansion of federal aid to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in the office. Among his goals is to get more people vaccinated for free.

According to a The Guardian report, Biden also said that he intends to create more places to get people vaccinated and use more medical teams to inject the shots in people's arms.

He noted that increasing supply and getting it delivered as soon as possible is one of the most challenging operational efforts ever undertaken by the U.S.

Meanwhile, Biden called the Trump administration's COVID-19 vaccine rollout a dismal failure. Biden said that things would get worse before things get better in the U.S.

Currently, the U.S. has a total of 23.4 million COVID-19 cases, with about 389,000 deaths.

Tags COVID-19, Death toll