The world’s total of human lives lost to COVID-19 reached 3 million on Easter weekend, apparently, with the future course of the pandemic thoroughly undetermined and dependent on the actions of nations in the coming days. Up to this point, more than one-third of those who have died of COVID, 1.1 million, have been in the “European region” of 57 countries, according to the WHO; and with 550,000 in the United States, more than half the world total death toll has been in the trans-Atlantic.
Now, however, the global level of new cases per day is rising again, and is shifting toward Ibero-America, Asia – particularly India — and Africa. Brazil’s negligence has spread the dangerous “Manaus variant” of COVID so rapidly that it now constitutes 30-50% of all cases in most countries of the continent. Nearly all hospital systems in South America and the Caribbean are overwhelmed or threatening to become so.
