The vaccination campaign that accelerates throughout Europe still fails to stop the advance of the virus that has left over a million deaths on the ground so far, in the Old Continent alone, and evokes sinister memories of pestilences and epidemics of a distant time, but which it doesn’t seem so remote anymore.
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The situation appears destined, at least in the short term, to get worse, with the WHO warning: contagions from Covid-19 are growing exponentially throughout the planet and the pandemic is reaching a critical point. The 52 European countries and territories, extending to the east as far as Azerbaijan and Russia, are the region of the world with the greatest number of deaths and cases, more than the disastrous Latin America, more than the United States and Canada together.
According to an AFP count, in the old continent the pandemic has caused the frightening figure of 1,000,288 deaths and 46,496,560 infections, while in Latin America and the Caribbean there are 832,577 deaths and 26,261,006 infections. In third place in this sad ranking, the United States and Canada have a total of 585,428 deaths and 32,269,104 infections. Then gradually all the others: Asia (285,824 deaths, 19,656,223 cases), the Middle East (119,104 deaths, 7,011,552 cases), Africa (115,779 deaths, 4,354,663 cases) and Oceania with only 1,006 deaths and 40,348 cases.
There have been at least 2,939,562 deaths worldwide since the new coronavirus made its appearance in Wuhan, China. A devastating picture, in the face of which the WHO launches a new alarm. From Geneva at a press conference, the general manager Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns that the pandemic is at a “critical point”, with infections increasing “exponentially” especially in South America and Asia.
“In January and February, the world saw a decline in Coronavirus infections for six consecutive weeks”, summarizes the WHO head, explaining that “now, instead, we come from seven consecutive weeks of growing cases and four weeks of deaths on the rise “. Particularly worrying is the epidemiological trend in the last seven days which recorded “the fourth highest number of cases in a single week”.
A battle, the one against Covid, which can only be won with a massive global vaccination campaign which however marks the step between delays in deliveries, inequalities in distribution, opaque hoarding. And the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, returns to point the finger at the failure of the multilateral response system to the pandemic. Ten countries in the world, denounces the head of the United Nations, have three quarters of all available vaccines in their hands.