More than 5,000,000 people have now died with Covid worldwide
The grim milestone has been reached less than two years after the crisis took hold, with the reported death rate at roughly 2%.
The global death toll from coronavirus has now reached five million, Johns Hopkins University says.
The grim milestone comes less than two years after the crisis took hold around the world – but is almost certainly significantly lower than the true figure.
The US, the European Union, the UK and Brazil account for nearly half of all reported deaths – despite only making up one-eighth of the world’s population and being relatively rich nations.
The US alone has recorded more than 740,000 lives lost, the highest of any nation, while the UK recently passed 140,000 official deaths.
Dr Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health, said: ‘This is a defining moment in our lifetime.
‘What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don’t get to another five million?’
The current death toll – more than a 14th of the UK population – rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Johns Hopkins has also recorded just under 250 million cases and says nearly 7 billion vaccine doses have been administered.
That means the official death rate is almost exactly 2%, based on the cases and death that have been reported.
Globally, the disease is now the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and stroke, with experts believing that lockdowns and other restrictions saved countless more lives.
Yet the figure is thought by experts to be a major undercount because of limited testing and people dying at home without medical attention, especially in poor parts of the world.
Hot spots for the pandemic have shifted over the 22 months since the outbreak is thought to have began in Wuhan, China.
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The virus is currently battering Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, especially where rumours, misinformation and distrust in government have hampered vaccination efforts.
But in general terms, wealthier countries have tended to be hit harder.
Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, director of Icap, a global health centre at Columbia University, said: ‘What’s uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries. That’s the irony of Covid-19.’
Those countries with longer life expectancies have larger proportions of older people, cancer survivors and nursing home residents, all of whom are especially vulnerable to Covid-19, Dr El-Sadr noted.
Meanwhile, poorer countries tend to have larger shares of children, teenagers and young adults, who are less likely to fall seriously ill from the virus.
Despite a horrifying surge of the Delta variant which peaked in early May, India now has a much lower reported daily death rate than wealthier Russia, the US or UK – though there is huge uncertainty around its figures.
Yet the apparent disconnect between ‘health and wealth’ is different within countries.
When deaths and infections are mapped in wealthier nations, poorer neighbourhoods are hit hardest.
‘When we get out our microscopes, we see that within countries, the most vulnerable have suffered most,’ Dr Ko explained.
Wealth has also played a role in the global vaccination drive, with rich countries accused of locking up supplies.
The US and others are already dispensing booster jabs at a time when millions across Africa have not received a single dose, though the rich countries are also shipping hundreds of millions of jabs to the rest of the world.
Africa remains the world’s least vaccinated region, with just 5% of the population of 1.3 billion people fully covered.
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