By John Ikani
An AFP tally on Monday revealed that the world has has passed the grim threshold of 4.5 million Covid-19 deaths.
No fewer than 4,500,620 people have been killed since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, a toll which keeps increasing amid global havoc wrecked by the Delta variant.
At the peak of the pandemic in January, an average of 14,800 people were being killed daily. However, a much lower figure of 10,000 deaths are reported every day in the world.
But the figure is much higher than at the start of July when some 7,800 daily deaths were registered.
With an average of 1,290 deaths per day over the past week, the United States is once again the country with the most new fatalities in the world.
The pandemic has already claimed more deaths in 2021 than in 2020, with more than 2.6 million fatalities officially reported since January against just under 1.9 million over the whole of last year.
Countries around the world are hoping the vaccines will ease the spread of the virus, but there are huge disparities between rich and poor nations.
Although vaccines remain very effective in preventing severe forms of illness, they are also thought to be less effective against the deadly and contagious Delta variant of COVID-19.
More so, in a study published last week by US health authorities, the efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna jabs against infection has dropped from 91 to 66 percent since the strain became dominant in the United States.
