The global death toll attributed to the coronavirus pandemic has topped four million and is still climbing, according to figures released Thursday by Johns Hopkins University.
A live tracker of the virus collated by the university outlined 4,001,791 people have died and more than 185 million have been infected during the pandemic.
UPI reports some 40 percent of those deaths can be attributed to the three countries of the United States, Brazil and India. The U.S. leads the world in deaths with 606,218 followed by Brazil with 528,540 and India with 405,028.
While the U.S. missed President Joe Biden’s goal of getting at least one vaccine shot into 70 percent of American adults by the Fourth of July, deaths nationwide are down sharply to around 225 per day, from a peak of over 3,400 per day in January.
The virus first emerged late December 2019 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan before infecting the world over, as Breitbart News reported.
Vaccines have seen daily deaths drastically drop in countries that have rolled out campaigns .
According to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, more than 3.29 billion doses have been administered since the first vaccine was approved for use late last year.
The World Health Organization’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said while rich countries are now loosening COVID-19 restrictions as if “the pandemic is already over,” people in poor countries continue to battle fast-infecting variants.
“Vaccine nationalism, where a handful of nations have taken the lion’s share, is morally indefensible and an ineffective public health strategy against a respiratory virus that is mutating quickly and becoming increasingly effective at moving from human-to-human,” he said during a media briefing on the pandemic.
“At this stage in the pandemic, the fact that millions of health and care workers have still not been vaccinated is abhorrent.”
UPI contributed to this story
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