The COVID-19 pandemic has killed one million people worldwide since January, the WHO said on Thursday, calling on governments to speed up vaccinations as a third of the world’s population is unvaccinated.
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“We have passed the tragic milestone of one million deaths from COVID-19 since the start of the year,” World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. press conference.
He called on the governments of all countries to redouble their efforts to vaccinate all health care workers, the elderly and other people most at risk, in order to achieve a vaccination coverage of 70% for the entire population. population.
In January this year, WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and their partners established the COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Partnership (CoVDP), with the aim of facilitating the distribution doses in 34 countries with less than 10% vaccination coverage, all but six of which are in Africa.
Now, Dr. Tedros said, only 10 countries still have less than 10% coverage.
“However, there is still a lot to do,” he said.
According to the boss of the WHO, a third of the world’s population is still not vaccinated, including two thirds of health personnel and three quarters of the elderly in low-income countries.
According to the latest WHO statistics, the COVID-19 pandemic has been responsible for 6.45 million deaths worldwide since the first cases emerged in late 2019 in China’s Wuhan region.