Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Even as vaccination campaign is in progress across many countries, January 20 turned out to be the deadliest day in 2021, so far, when over 17,500 deaths were reported due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the world, indicating unpredictability of the virus, its strains, and impact.
The January 20 toll beat the previous highest record of January 8 this year as the United States and the United Kingdom reported 4,229 and 1,820 deaths, respectively on Wednesday, after the new British-born strain of the deadly virus surfaced, media said, quoting the Johns Hopkins University data.
The way the virus spread last year in the spring season, worried health officials are bracing for a sudden spike of fatalities in coming weeks.
Since its outbreak a year ago, the pandemic has infected more than 98 million people and claimed 2.1 million lives so far around the globe, with the US alone accounting for 25 million infections and over 424,000 deaths. India is next, with over 10 million infections and more than 153,000 deaths.
India launched the world’s largest immunization program with two vaccines on January 16 and has vaccinated more than a million frontline workers, including medical professionals, in the last week.
Global reports suggest that the early stages of vaccine campaigns have yet to tame the winter wave tearing through the northern hemisphere. Governments have warned of more heavy death tolls before anything gets better.
However, a report from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) predicted that global deaths would stay at a similar level for the next week or so, before dropping in early February.
America continues to record the worst outbreak in the world and a forecast from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that the US death toll could hit 508,000 by February 13.
Mexico, another of the world’s most badly hit countries, recorded a second consecutive day of COVID-19 deaths topping 1,500.
The World Health Organization’s latest weekly analysis reported some 4.7 million new cases in the week ended January 17, a decline of six percent from the previous week. Yet the number of new deaths had climbed to a record high at 93 000, up to nine percent from the previous week.
President Joe Biden’s new US Administration said it would re-join the WHO’s international scheme to deliver vaccines to poorer countries, after his predecessor Donald Trump quit the agency and shunned the Covax initiative.
The top US advisor on infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the WHO on Thursday that the new White House would remain a member of the UN agency.
“This is a good day for WHO and for global health,” WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “WHO is a family of nations and we are all glad that the US is staying in the family,” he added.
The first consignments of vaccines paid for under the Covax scheme are due to be shipped in February.
Meanwhile, US Vice-President Kamala Harris spoke to WHO chief Ghebreyesus over the phone on Friday to discuss the decision by the Biden Administration to re-join the UN health agency. President Biden has reversed a key foreign policy decision his predecessor Donald Trump took last year after accusing the WHO of incompetence and bowing to Chinese pressure over the coronavirus pandemic.
Harris emphasized that she and Biden believe that the WHO is vital to controlling the spread of COVID-19 and building back better global health and pandemic preparedness, the White House said. “
She also stressed the Biden-Harris Administration’s strong support for efforts to strengthen the global COVID-19 response, mitigate its secondary impacts, including on women and girls, and advance global health security to prevent the next outbreak from becoming an epidemic or pandemic.