The worldwide death toll from Covid has hit six million as the virus continues to wreak havoc around the world.
It is the latest grim milestone for the pandemic and a tragic reminder of Covid’s unrelenting nature as more people shed their masks and slowly return to normality.
The last million deaths were recorded in the past four months, according to the tally compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
That’s slightly slower than the previous million, but it shows that many countries are still struggling with the virus.
Remote Pacific islands, long protected by their isolation, are just now grappling with their first outbreaks and deaths, fuelled by the highly contagious Omicron variant.
Hong Kong is also seeing deaths soar as officials desperately test its entire population of 7.5 million people no less than three times this month – all while clinging to mainland China’s ‘zero-Covid’ strategy.
Death rates remain high in Poland as it welcomes hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn Ukraine.
They are also high in Hungary, Romania and other eastern European countries, which are all taking in people from Ukraine – a country with poor vaccination coverage and high cases and deaths.
One million deaths have been reported in the United States alone, making it the largest official death toll in the world.
The enormous figure of six million deaths is more than the populations of Berlin and Brussels combined, but experts believe the number is likely a vast undercount.
There are also excess deaths related to the pandemic but not from actual Covid infections.
This includes people who died from preventable causes but didn’t receive treatment because hospitals were full.
According to analysis of excess deaths, the true number of Covid deaths is estimated as between 14 million and 23.5 million.
Overall, some 450 million cases of Covid have been recorded.
