Coronavirus Grim Milestone

Recorded: March 8th, 2020

Transcript:

The number of people world wide who have died with Covid19 has now passed a million, officially. The U.N. Secretary General called it a mind-numbing figure and it's very likely to be quite an underestimate. In the U.K. daily deaths from the virus have reached their highest level in three months and Germany is now warning that cases are likely to rise during the winter.

Every grave marks a life cut short, a mother, father, brother, sister lost to Covid19. This is Indonesia, but the impact of coronavirus since it emerged in China late last year has been truly global.
These are the five countries which have recorded the most deaths with Covid19. The United States is top with more than 200,000, followed by Brazil, India, Mexico and the United Kingdom, and many of those deaths especially among the frail elderly will have been at least partially due to other underlying health problems. 33 million cases of coronavirus have been recorded and we know the pandemic is accelerating with 2 million new cases every week. But that is a gross underestimate because so many cases are simply never registered, in part, because so many people have no symptoms, and that makes it really difficult to work out accurate mortality rate for this disease. Now coronavirus can also leave people with chronic health problems; what's been dubbed Long Covid affecting regions like the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain and nervous system.
Humanity's actually going into quite a dark zone. right now. I mean, we just have to look round the world. The virus is coming back with a vengeance into Europe. It's still very active in the Americas. It's also very active in the Indian sub-continent. It's picking up again in Russia, in Indonesia. This is a global, serious situation.

Every year around 57 million die globally from all causes. If we look at three other infectious diseases, tuberculosis, TB, a bacterial infection. It's largely a disease of poverty and is curable with antibiotics and yet it kills around one and a half million people a year. Many of those are co-infected with HIV. Flu, seasonal influenza, kills up to 650,000 people in a bad year, despite there being a vaccine; and measles, a highly contagious viral infection. It causes 140,000 deaths a year, most of them young children. Yet, it is entirely preventable by a vaccine. Scientists are working flat out on coronavirus vaccines but the World Health Organisation has warned that Covid death toll could hit two million before one is widely available. Fergus Walsh, BBC News.

Notes:

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