The known total global coronavirus infections surpassed 200 million Wednesday, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The global death toll stands at 4.2 million.
That daunting figure -- more than the populations of Germany, France and Spain combined -- fails to capture how far the virus has embedded itself within humanity.
While always an imperfect measure of a virus that causes no symptoms in many of the people it infects, with many infections going unreported, case counts have provided a useful tool for much of the pandemic.
A surge in case numbers has too often been followed by a crush of people crowding emergency rooms. And then, several weeks later, fatality counts have typically spiked. It took more than a year for the pandemic to reach its 100 millionth case, and little more than six months to double that.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZJ95jgfpoI]
The number of those killed by the virus also is staggering.
The official tallies stand at more than 614,000 deaths in the U.S., 558,000 in Brazil and 425,000 in India. Mexico has recorded more than 240,000 fatalities, and Peru nearly 200,000. Britain, Colombia, France, Italy and Russia have each recorded well over 100,000 deaths. The global toll is a serious underestimate, experts say, given the discrepancies in the way nations record covid-19 deaths.
The emergence of the delta variant -- thought to be about twice as infectious as the original version first detected in Wuhan, China -- is adding fuel to a fire that has never stopped raging.
In one week alone, July 19-25, nearly 4 million cases were recorded by the World Health Organization -- a jump of 8% from the previous week.
With many of the new infections occurring in countries lacking vaccines or among the unvaccinated, 69,000 covid-19 deaths were recorded that week.
Despite lockdowns, travel restrictions, mask mandates, business closures, social distancing and radical shifts in individual behaviors, the virus continues to find a way to spread.
Some countries, like Australia, had success keeping case counts low thanks to geographic isolation and strict lockdown measures. But that may not be possible given the rise of the delta variant. And governments are facing increasingly angry protests while trying to enforce lockdowns on weary populations and struggling businesses.
[CORONAVIRUS: Click here for our complete coverage » arkansasonline.com/coronavirus]
Over the past six months, however, the calculus for measuring the danger of the moment has become more complicated. A rise in case counts alone, in many places, may not presage a flood of very sick people.
For countries where vaccines are scarce, the math of the pandemic remains unchanged. Indonesian authorities reported nearly 57,000 new cases on one day in mid-July, seven times as many as a month earlier, the highest figure since the pandemic began. Twelve days later, more than 2,000 died in a single day, and the country now is nearing 100,000 dead from covid-19.
But in nations fortunate and rich enough to have ample vaccine supplies, public health officials are watching anxiously to see how thoroughly mass inoculation campaigns have severed the link between case counts and pressure on health care systems.
In the U.S., with more than 90 million people eligible for shots who have not had them, experts warn that a rise in cases this winter is inevitable.
"I don't think we're going to see lockdowns," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday. "I think we have enough of the percentage of people in the country -- not enough to crush the outbreak -- but I believe enough to not allow us to get into the situation we were in last winter. But things are going to get worse."
The spread of the virus among the vaccinated is being watched intensively around the world, and much remains unknown. Are there differences in breakthrough infections depending on which vaccine is administered? How long does it take for protection to fade? And, perhaps most importantly, how will a rise in breakthrough infections affect hospitalization rates?
Public health officials are confident that there is little evidence to suggest that the virus has found a way to escape the main goal of vaccines: preventing serious sickness and death.
WHO: PUT OFF BOOSTERS
The WHO on Wednesday called for a moratorium on booster shots until the end of September in an effort to help all countries inoculate 10% of their populations.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made the appeal mostly to wealthier countries that have far outpaced the developing world in numbers of vaccinations. He said richer countries have administered about one dose of coronavirus vaccine for every person on average, while low-income countries -- hampered by short supplies -- have provided only about 1.5 doses per 100 people.
WHO officials say the science is unproven about whether giving booster shots to people who have already received two vaccine doses is effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
The U.N. health agency has repeatedly called for rich countries to do more to help improve access to vaccines in the developing world. It has argued that no one is safe until everyone is safe because the longer and more widely the coronavirus circulates, the greater the chance that new variants could emerge -- and prolong a global crisis in fighting the pandemic.
Tedros pointed to a WHO target he had announced in May seeking to ensure that 10% of the populations in all countries receive vaccinations.
"I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the delta variant, but we cannot and we should not accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it while the world's most vulnerable people remain unprotected," Tedros said.
He also called on vaccine producers to prioritize Covax, the program set up last year to equitably distribute vaccines to every corner of the planet. Many lower-income countries rely on Covax, but the initiative has delivered a fraction of the 1.8 billion doses it aims to ship by early 2022.
The agency has no power to require countries to act, and many in the past have ignored its appeals on issues like donating doses, limiting cross-border travel and taking steps to boost production of vaccines in developing countries.
Israel, France, Germany and many Middle Eastern countries already have started administering boosters, and other nations, including the United States and Britain, are considering plans to do so in the wake of the emergence of the highly transmissible delta variant.
Asked about the WHO position, White House press secretary Jen Psaki called it a "false choice" and suggested the U.S. could both donate vaccine doses abroad and provide boosters at home.
"We announced just yesterday that we hit an important milestone of over 110 million vaccines donated to the world. That is more than any other country has shared combined," she said. "We also, in this country, have enough supply, to ensure that every American has access to a vaccine. We will have enough supply to ensure, if the FDA decides that boosters are recommended for a portion of the population, to provide those as well."
RESEARCH CAUTION
Vaccines in England were 60% effective at preventing symptomatic cases of covid-19 caused by the delta variant, researchers reported Wednesday, a figure lower than most previous estimates that scientists nevertheless said ought to be interpreted cautiously.
The results, drawn from testing a random sample of nearly 100,000 volunteers, offered some of the most extensive evidence to date of vaccines' performance against the delta variant, which has driven surges of cases in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere. They indicated that vaccines were 50% effective at preventing people from becoming infected, with or without symptoms.
But scientists cautioned that the results had an exceedingly high degree of statistical uncertainty, and relied largely on volunteers self-reporting their vaccination status.
The study sent tests to a random sample of volunteers, rather than relying on people to seek coronavirus tests themselves, so its figures include people who may not otherwise have thought much of their symptoms or known they had the virus at all. Estimates of vaccine effectiveness tend to be lower in studies that include mild or asymptomatic cases.
The results also did not distinguish between the different vaccines being used in Britain. By mid-July, roughly twice as many people had been fully vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine as with Pfizer's, the main two shots in use in Britain. In previous studies, the Pfizer vaccine has appeared more effective against the delta variant than AstraZeneca's.
The researchers, led by a team from Imperial College London, said that their estimates of vaccine effectiveness were lower than those reported previously in England but consistent with data from Israel.
Other studies in England have suggested that vaccines are more than 90% effective in preventing people from being hospitalized with a covid-19 case caused by the delta variant.
"Participants who reported being vaccinated were at substantially reduced risk of testing positive compared with those who reported not being vaccinated," the latest study said.
It has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Information for this article was contributed by Marc Santora, Isabella Kwai and Benjamin Mueller of The New York Times; by Jamey Keaten of The Associated Press; and by Corinne Gretler of Bloomberg.