Between 80,000 and 180,000 healthcare professionals died of COVID-19 between January 2020 and May this year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization released Thursday.
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Of the 135 million healthcare professionals worldwide, “between 80,000 and 180,000” died between the start of the pandemic and May 2021, the report said.
“These estimates stem from the 3.45 million deaths associated with Covid-19 that were announced to the World Health Organization in May 2021; a number in and of itself is significantly lower than the actual number of deaths,” the organization said in a statement.
That is why it is imperative that healthcare professionals are vaccinated as a priority. Presenting the data to the media, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said data from 119 countries indicates that two out of five health workers worldwide are fully immunized.
But, of course, this average hides significant differences between regions and economic groups. In Africa, less than 1 in 10 health professionals have been fully vaccinated. At the same time, in most high-income countries, more than 80% of health workers are fully immunized.”
Faced with this observation, WHO is calling on all countries to ensure that all health professionals are vaccinated as a priority against COVID-19, along with other at-risk groups.
“More than 10 months after the first vaccines were approved, the fact that millions of healthcare professionals have not yet been vaccinated is in itself an indictment of the countries and companies that control the global supply of vaccines,” said the committee chair. Who is the.
Dr Tedros continues to denounce vaccine inequalities and relentlessly calls on countries with sufficient doses to share, while the international Covax mechanism is holding back due to a lack of adequate vaccines.
G20 countries have pledged to donate more than 1.2 billion doses of the vaccine to Kovacs. To date, only 150 million have been delivered. For most donations, we don’t have a timeline. We don’t know how many doses Kovacs will receive, or when,” he said.
