United States: COVID-19 death toll surpasses 700,000 mark despite wide scale vaccine drive

The COVID-19 deaths in US surpassed the 700,000 mark late Friday, October 1, a figure bigger than the population of Boston. The past 100,000 deaths happened during the period when vaccinations, which largely prevent deaths, hospitalisations, and serious illness, were available for every American over the age of 12.

Doctors, public health officials, and Americans have been frustrated by this milestone as they have witnessed a pandemic that had been lessening earlier in the summer take a gloomy turn. Vaccination refusal by tens of millions of Americans has allowed the highly deadly delta variant to spread across the country, increasing the mortality toll from 600,000 to 700,000 in just three and a half months.

Since the middle of June, the virus has killed roughly 17,000 Floridians, making it the worst state in the country during that time. With 13,000 deaths, Texas came in second. Although the two states only account for 15% of the country's population, they have accounted for more than 30% of the country's deaths since the country passed the 600,000 mark.

Dr. David Dowdy, an Infectious Disease researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has studied publicly available state data and estimates that unvaccinated people accounted for at least 70,000 of the last 100,000 deaths. And, according to him, the majority of vaccinated people who died from breakthrough infections received the virus from an unvaccinated person.

“I believe it's fair to say that if we had been more effective in our immunisation, we could have prevented 90 percent of those deaths since mid-June," Dowdy said, AP reported.

Worldwide COVID-19 death toll

The global death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 3 million people on October 2, despite repeated setbacks in the global vaccinations campaign and a worsening crisis in countries such as Brazil, India, and France.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the number of lives lost is almost equal to the populations of Kyiv, Ukraine, Caracas, Venezuela, and metropolitan Lisbon, Portugal. It is larger than Chicago (2.7 million people) and equal to the combined populations of Philadelphia and Dallas.

Because of probable government concealment and the many cases missed in the early phases of the outbreak, which began in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, the true number is estimated to be substantially higher.

Deaths are on the rise again, averaging roughly 12,000 per day, and new cases are also on the rise, surpassing 700,000 per day.

“We don't want to be in this scenario 16 months into a pandemic when we have proven control measures,” Maria Van Kerkhove, one of the World Health Organization's COVID-19 leaders, said, AP reported.

(With inputs from AP)

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