- The number of deaths from COVID-19 has passed one million in almost nine months.
- The WHO has warned that could double if countries don’t take greater action to tackle the pandemic.
- 56 million people died in 2017, with cardiovascular disease the leading cause of death globally.
More than a million people have now died of COVID-19 – the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 – in the nine months since the first cases were reported in China.
The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called it an “agonizing milestone” – and Reuters calculated it equated to one person dying every 16 seconds.
While the pandemic has spread to 188 countries or regions, the five with the most deaths account for more than half the global total (562,139): the US (205,070), Brazil (142,058), India (96,318), Mexico (76,603) and the UK (42,090).
