Covid-19 deaths reach 3 million worldwide as cases continue to surge

Name: Global Covid-19 death toll passes three million mark
Uploaded: 2021-04-17T09:16:23.000Z
Duration: 5 min 23 s
Description: Global Covid-19 death toll passes three million mark

Just over a year after pandemic declared, global death toll hits new high with a million cases since January

Infections have been surging in recent weeks in some regions, despite the roll-out of vaccines to combat the disease

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Cemetery workers in Brazil bury a victim of Covid-19, which has now claimed 3 million lives around the world. Photo: AP

Simone McCarthy

Published: 5:16pm, 17 Apr 2021Updated: 6:03pm, 17 Apr 2021

Just over a year since Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, the world crossed a threshold on Saturday with the global death toll reaching 3 million lives.

It took around 10 months from the first known cases of the disease before one million deaths were confirmed in late September last year. The loss of another million lives was recorded on January 14, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Even as the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines has brought hope for an end to the pandemic, cases are again surging in some regions, driven in part by new, more transmissible variants of the virus.

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Global Covid-19 death toll passes three million mark

The latest threshold was crossed following seven consecutive weeks of increasing new cases worldwide, and four weeks of increasing new deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

“Around the world, cases and deaths are continuing to increase at worrying rates,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday.

“Globally, the number of new cases per week has nearly doubled over the past two months. This is approaching the highest rate of infection that we have seen so far during the pandemic.”

The surge is a major setback from the start of the year, when new global cases declined for six weeks. Since mid-February, new infections have been on the rise again - a phenomenon experts attribute both to the relaxing of control measures and more transmissible variants - along with the inevitable rise in weekly global deaths.

Covid-19 deaths reach 3 million worldwide as cases continue to surge

Just over a year after pandemic declared, global death toll hits new high with a million cases since January Infections have been surging in recent weeks in some regions, despite the roll-out of vaccines to combat the disease

Just over a year after pandemic declared, global death toll hits new high with a million cases since January

Infections have been surging in recent weeks in some regions, despite the roll-out of vaccines to combat the disease