WASHINGTON | The United States surpassed the threshold of 400,000 dead from COVID-19 on Tuesday on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration, a grim horizon for other countries in the world like the United Kingdom, which is breaking death records , or Germany, which extended and hardened its measures pending a truly massive vaccination.
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The threshold of 300,000 deaths was exceeded just a month ago, in mid-December. The United States is by far the most bereaved nation in absolute terms, according to official records. But some other countries record more deaths in proportion to their population, such as Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and even Russia if we take into account the excess mortality statistics revealed at the end of December.
In Europe, it is the United Kingdom and Portugal that have reached daily death records from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, with 1,610 and 218 deaths respectively. Portugal, a country of 10 million inhabitants, has also become the country in the world with the most infected people recorded in relation to its population.
Hardening in Germany
In Germany, where nearly a thousand coronavirus deaths were recorded on Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced to tighten restrictions against COVID-19, including the compulsory medical mask in transport and shops, and extend them until to February 14.
All restrictions already in place, such as the closure of schools, bars, restaurants and cultural venues, “will apply until February 14, 2021,” the Chancellor announced after nearly eight hours of negotiations with regional leaders .
The pandemic has killed at least 2,041,289 people around the world since its appearance in China at the end of December 2019, according to a report established by AFP on Tuesday.
Nearly 95.5 million infections have been officially diagnosed and the appearance of new, more contagious variants of the virus has raised fears of the worst.
The United States is also the country with the highest number of cases: more than 24 million, according to the count from Johns Hopkins University, and Joe Biden was preparing Tuesday to launch his own agenda against COVID-19, in rupture with that of outgoing President Donald Trump.
He has already announced that he would present a decree on Wednesday to make it compulsory to wear a mask in premises and spaces dependent on the federal state, as well as when traveling between states, which Donald Trump has always refused.
He promised an acceleration of the vaccination campaign, with 100 million doses injected during his first 100 days in office.
Morocco extends
To date, according to an AFP count, at least 60 countries or territories, comprising 61% of the world’s population, have launched their vaccination campaign. But 11 countries concentrate 90% of the injected doses.
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has also warned that the world would face a “catastrophic moral failure” if rich countries monopolized vaccines to the detriment of poor countries.
India, Brazil, Russia … massive campaigns are being launched or are continuing all over the world, with varying fortunes, still enormous logistical constraints, and the mistrust of skeptics, even anti-vaccines.
In Europe, the United Kingdom, struck by a variant of the virus up to 70% more contagious according to health authorities, has opened its campaign to those over 70 years old. One in eight people in England had been infected with the new coronavirus in December.
In France, injections have been for the over-75s since Monday, while they had until then been reserved for residents of retirement homes and caregivers.
The epidemic has reduced life expectancy there by several months, the National Institute of Statistics (Insee) said on Tuesday.
In Italy, the idea of distributing vaccine doses according to the wealth produced by a territory, put forward by an official from Lombardy, the industrial and financial lung of the peninsula, raised an outcry.
In Latin America, Argentina, one of the first countries in the world to use the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, announced on Tuesday that it had started administering the second scheduled dose. The country of 44 million people has recorded more than 45,000 deaths from COVID-19.
But in the Middle East, where Israel – which has already vaccinated a quarter of its population – has extended its containment measures until the end of January, a country like Lebanon is only awaiting its first delivery of the American vaccine in mid-February. -German Pfizer / BioNTech.
As for the new variant of the coronavirus identified in South Africa in October, now predominant in the country, it is not more deadly, but 1.5 times more contagious, according to the authorities.
Rwanda’s capital Kigali has been confined again since Tuesday due to an increase in infections, and Morocco has extended the month-long curfew by two weeks.
Limited powers of the WHO
According to experts from an independent group commissioned by the WHO, it “would have been possible to act faster on the basis of the first signs” in January 2020.
According to this same expert report, the pandemic exposed the weaknesses of the WHO: an institution with insufficient resources and “limited power” in relation to States.
“At the end of the day, the WHO does not have the power to enforce anything or to investigate” on its own in a country, according to this group.
Another team of WHO experts is also currently in China, to try to trace the origins of COVID-19.
China, in fact, confined Monday about three million additional inhabitants in the northeast of the country, after new cases.
300 km south of Beijing, in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei province, hundreds of workers are building a giant quarantine center. Images that recall the construction of a huge hospital in early 2020 in Wuhan.
In Australia, two first cases of COVID-19 were recorded on Tuesday among players at the International tennis tournament scheduled to begin on February 8 in Melbourne, as criticism and concern mount over the holding of the competition.