The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 5 October 2021
by Mike Evans
“Nowadays, we are confronted by a huge gap between rich and poor. This is not only morally wrong, but practically a mistake. It leads to the rich living in anxiety and the poor living in frustration, which has the potential to lead to more violence. We have to work to reduce this gap. “
– Dalai Lama
The last few days has seen the toll for the Pandemic reach the tragic milestone of 5 million deaths with unvaccinated people particularly exposed to the virulent Delta strain.
The variant has exposed the wide disparities in vaccination rates between rich and poor nations, and the upshot of vaccine hesitancy in some western nations. In this report we are looking at the impact still on a number of countries and what is happening now.
More than half of all global deaths reported on a seven-day average were in the United States, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and India.
While it took just over a year for the COVID-19 death toll to hit 2.5 million, the next 2.5 million deaths were recorded in just under eight months. An average of 8,000 deaths were reported daily across the world over the last week, or around five deaths every minute. However, the global death rate has been slowing in recent weeks.
There has been increasing focus in recent days on getting vaccines to poorer nations, where many people are yet to receive a first dose, even as their richer counterparts have begun giving booster shots.
More than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.
The World Health Organization this week said its COVAX distribution programme would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.Co-led by the WHO, COVAX has since January largely allocated doses proportionally among its 140-plus beneficiary states according to population size.
“For the October supply we designed a different methodology, only covering participants with low sources of supply,” Mariangela Simao, WHO Assistant Director General for Access to Vaccines, said in a recording of a conference presentation last week posted on the WHO’s website. Countries considered among the least covered are targeted for supplies, although there was no mention of the countries that would receive the vaccines. COVAX has so far overseen these allotments. The presentation went on to detail the fact that of the more than 90 poorer nations served by COVAX, about half had immunised less than 20% of their populations and 26 less than 10%. Many wealthy nations reached 70% coverage during the northern hemisphere summer.
About 75 million doses of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Sinopharm vaccines will be distributed in October to 49 of over 500 million shots, of which about 300 million have been shipped to recipient countries.
Meanwhile, the United States, which has been battling vaccine misinformation that has caused about one-third of the population to avoid inoculations, surpassed 700,000 deaths on Friday, the highest toll of any country. The country has reported an average of more than 2,000 deaths per day over the past week, which represents about 60% of the peak in fatalities in January. The United States still leads the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths, accounting for 19% and 14% of all reported infections and fatalities.
The highly transmissible Delta variant has driven a surge in COVID-19 cases that peaked around mid-September before falling to the current level of about 117,625 cases per day, based on a seven-day rolling average.
That is still well above the 10,000 cases a day that top U.S. infectious diseases. Expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has said all needs to be reached to end the health crisis.
U.S. cases and hospitalizations have been trending lower, but health officials are bracing for a possible resurgence as cooler weather forces more activities indoors.While national hospitalization numbers have fallen in recent weeks, some states, particularly in the south of the country, are bucking that trend to record big rises, putting pressure on healthcare systems.
Last week saw the U.S. President, Joe Biden, receive a booster shot, hoping to provide an example for Americans on the need to get the extra shot even as millions go without their first.
While scientists are divided over the need for booster shots when so many people in the United States and other countries remain unvaccinated, Biden announced the push in August as part of an effort to shore up protection against the highly transmissible Delta variant.
About 56% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, with around 65% receiving at least one dose, according to the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New York hospitals on Monday began firing or suspending healthcare workers for defying a state order to be vaccinated, while a federal judge ruled in favor of an Ohio private healthcare provider that had mandated shots for its staff.
Vaccination rates in some parts of the Midwest and South are lagging those in the Northeast and parts of the West Coast, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, indicating a divide between the rural and urban parts of the country.
Russia reported 887 coronavirus-related deaths on Friday, the largest single-day death toll it has recorded since the pandemic began and the fourth day in a row it has set that record. Only 33% of Russia’s eligible population has received a first vaccine dose.
According to the Worldometer.info site in the past week there have been 165,623 new reported cases compared to 145,985 in the previous week, a rise of 13%.
As a region, South America has the highest death toll in the world accounting for 21% of all reported deaths and over 1.1 million deaths. Brazil has the highest death toll of the South American countries with 597,986 deaths recorded so far followed by Peru with 199,485.
However on closer analysis Peru with a much smaller population has more than double the number of deaths per 1 million of population than Brazil. However, when we look at the latest weekly comparisons of reported cases Brazil has 116,149 cases in the past week and the whole of South America has recorded only 166,996.
While many of the South American countries have seen a big drop in cases, Brazil is still suffering from the lack of vaccines.
North America and Eastern Europe contribute more than 14% of all fatalities each, according to Reuters analysis. The smaller countries of Eastern Europe have been hard hit by the pandemic. When looking at the number of deaths per 1 million of population, Bosnia and Herzegovina have the highest rate at 3,267 deaths per 1 million of population. They are followed closely by North Macedonia, Hungary, Montenegro and Bulgaria all with over 3000 deaths per million of population. Whilst Russia and the UK have the highest number of deaths in Europe the number per 1 million is a lot lower at 1,444 and 2004 respectively although it should be notes that Russia’s own health minister reckons that the number of deaths due to Cpovid 19 should be around 3 time more than they have reported.
To finish this report we look at India, one of the first countries ravaged by the Delta variant, which has gone from an average of 4,000 deaths a day to less than 300 as its vaccination campaign is rolled out. India recorded a spike of 20,799 new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours. The country also witnessed 180 deaths, taking the death toll to 448,997. On the vaccine front it was announced that 70% of the adult population had received the first dose of the vaccine and in Delhi they have reopened the schools for the first time since the pandemic took hold in March 2020.
With the Delta variant now the dominant strain around the globe and has been reported in 187 out of 194 World Health Organization member countries it is still a viable threat to the health of the world and there is still a way to go before we can safely say we are through the pandemic.
Until the next time Stay Safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 235,846,317
Total Deaths Worldwide – 4,818,348
Total Recovered Worldwide – 212,751,246
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 18,276,723 (7.7 % of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 217,569,594
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
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