Covid-19 death toll surpasses 6 million as countries start to drop restrictions

You may not have realized it, but the official toll of people who passed away from Covid-19 surpassed six million people in March.

Data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reveals that South Korea (pictured), Germany, Vietnam, France, and the United Kingdom lead the surge of new Covid-19 cases.

The Guardian reports that most coronavirus-related restrictions were dropped in Germany in mid-March after a heated debate in Parliament.

This is despite a daily average in Germany of almost 300,000 Covid-19 cases during that time, though the number has dropped in the following weeks.

The number of those infected in France, as The Guardian reports, grew 25% within the first week after the use of indoor face masks and other controls was dropped on March 14.

Austria reintroduced in late March face masks and other coronavirus-related measures to fight a surge of Covid-19 numbers in the country.

Across America, restrictions have also been dropped. The states of California and New York, former pandemic hubs, now only demand face masks for health care centers, nursing homes, detention centers and shelters.

Unlike Europe, as The New York Times points out, numbers in the United States have been much better than in Asia and Europe.

A new variant of Omicron, labeled BA.2, has quickly become the most dominant version of the virus. BA.2 was nicknamed 'Stealth Omicron' due to the difficulty to track when it appeared in late January 2022.

More worryingly, both Omicron variants have mutated together, developing in early April a whole new variant: Omicron XE.

However, not all is bad news. The reported death rate is slowing down as more people get vaccinated. It took three months, from January to April, to go from 2 to 3 million deaths and four months, from April to July, to hit another million.

The Covid-19 pandemic officially claimed over five million lives in November 2021. However, the real toll could be much higher than we think.

The United States led at the time in the number of deaths that have been accounted for, with 745,000 in total. The country was then followed by Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia.

TIME magazine says that Covid-19 has become the third cause of death around the globe, after heart disease and stroke.

Important news outlets like The New York Times have put into question the capacity of developing countries in regions like Africa and Latin America to accurately record Covid-19 cases.

India, for example, reported over 400,000 cases and almost 4,000 deaths in a single day during the Delta variant wave of mid-2021. It's not hard to imagine that a developing country facing a highly-contagious virus with an overtaxed health system can make some counting errors. After all, the priority is saving lives.

Other experts have doubted the veracity of the data provided by certain countries due to a lack of government transparency and the impossibility for independent sources to confirm the numbers.

The Washington Post reports that calculations from independent Russian experts indicate that the official toll might be off by, at most, 500,000 deaths. They claim that Putin's government is manipulating data for political reasons.

There are many people who passed away in the past two years due to conditions indirectly related to Covid-19. These include people who couldn't get treated due to the strain on health services at the peaks of the pandemic or people whose previous conditions worsened after getting infected by the virus.

Many think that the real number might be as high as 10 million deaths. Professor Amber D’Souza from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is one of them. Still, he declared on National Geographic, "five million is such a staggering number on its own."

Countries such as Spain and Italy, which were hit pretty badly by the coronavirus in the early months of the global pandemic, have been trying to slowly go back to normal with Covid-19 cases steadily dwindling.

The fight against the virus is far from over. Thousands of people die from Covid-19 every day and there are still many around the globe that are unvaccinated, particularly in poorer, more vulnerable countries.

Meanwhile, in developed nations, a few groups question the vaccine while also putting into risk all the work done to stop covid-19.

The longer the virus spreads around the population, the longer new mutations can evolve and develop resistance to vaccines.

This is what happened with the Delta variant and what many are worried it might occur with the recently discovered delta plus.

Only by working together can humanity properly win the fight against the virus and stop millions of deaths.