The covid-19 pandemic has caused a million deaths worldwide since January, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday, calling on governments to accelerate the vaccination of their populations.
“We have passed the tragic milestone of one million deaths from covid-19 since the beginning of the year,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference.
The head of the UN health agency asked the governments of all countries to redouble their efforts to vaccinate all health workers, the elderly and other especially exposed or vulnerable groups, to achieve vaccination coverage of 70% for the whole population.
In January 2022, the WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and their partners created the Alliance for the Delivery of the Vaccine against COVID-19, with the aim of facilitating the distribution of doses in 34 countries where vaccination coverage is less than 10%, of which all but 60 are in Africa.
Tedros congratulated himself because there were only 10 States left with coverage below 10%, although “much remains to be done.”
The head of the WHO warned that a third of the world’s population is still not vaccinated, including two-thirds of health personnel and three-quarters of older people in low-income countries.
According to the agency’s latest statistics, the covid pandemic is responsible for 6.45 million deaths worldwide since the first cases appeared in late 2019 in China. YS
