Africa-Press – Botswana. Covid-19 has caused more than one million deaths worldwide since January, the World Health Organization (WHO) indicated Thursday, asking governments to speed up vaccination, as part of the population remains unimmunized.
“We have passed the tragic milestone of one million deaths due to Covid-19 since the beginning of the year,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference.
He asked countries to redouble their efforts to vaccinate all health workers, the elderly and the most vulnerable people so that 70% vaccination coverage can be achieved worldwide.
According to the WHO, one-third of the world’s population remains unimmunized, including two-thirds of health professionals and three-quarters of the elderly in the poorest countries.
In January, the WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and their partners created a mechanism to facilitate the distribution of vaccines against Covid-19 in 34 countries where vaccine coverage was less than 10%. All but six countries were in Africa.
Thanks to the initiative, only 10 countries continue to have vaccination coverage below 10%. According to the latest WHO statistics, Covid-19 has caused 6.45 million deaths worldwide since the first cases appeared in late 2019 in China.
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