A worker wearing a protective suit and carrying an umbrella walks past the graves of Covid-19 victims at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Brazil on February 25, 2021.
Michael Dantas | AFP | Getty Images
The global death toll from Covid-19 topped 4 million late Wednesday as infections topped 185 million worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Many countries have struggled with an increase in Covid infections in recent months due to the spread of a more transmissible Delta variant that first appeared in India. It’s been more than a year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic.
WHO has said Delta is the “fastest, fittest” variant yet, and health experts have warned that it could undermine efforts to contain the pandemic, even if vaccination campaigns are underway.
“When it’s more communicable, you get more cases. When you get more cases, you get more serious diseases,” said Dale Fisher, professor of infectious diseases at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.
Fisher told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” that higher Covid transmission could lead to “more opportunities for new variants” that could be more transferable than Delta.
Vaccination against Covid-19 has started in many countries with more than 3.3 billion administered doses worldwide, Hopkins data showed.
But high-income countries, which have secured the most early vaccine shipments, are way ahead of most middle- and low-income countries in vaccinating their populations.
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