Covid, 3.5 million deaths in 2021: more than HIV, malaria and TB together

“Due to Covid-19, 2021 was a year in which we lost 3.5 million people: more deaths than from HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined in 2020”. This was stated by the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at a press conference in Geneva, underlining that there is “no doubt that the unequal sharing of vaccines has cost many lives”. Currently, he warned, “Covid-19 continues to claim around 50 thousand victims every week around the world”. Over 4.1 million new cases of Covid-19 and just under 45,000 new deaths worldwide in the week of December 13-19. These are the numbers reported by the World Health Organization in the latest weekly epidemiological update on Covid-19. Impressive numbers, even though the global number of new cases remained similar to those reported during the previous 7 days in the past week and the weekly incidence of deaths decreased by 9%. In total, as of December 19, there have been over 273 million infections and more than 5.3 million deaths globally. The African region, WHO points out, continued to report the largest increase in new cases in the past week (53%), followed by the Western Pacific, which recorded a 12% increase. But it is the European region that is confirmed as the one with the highest incidence of weekly cases (279.9 per 100,000 inhabitants) and deaths (2.9 per 100,000 inhabitants). The highest number of new infections was reported by the United States of America (725,750 new cases), the United Kingdom (507,984 new cases, + 45%), France (358,175 new cases, + 7%) and Germany (283,673 new cases. , down 19%).