COVID-19 deaths exceed one million globally

One million people have now died of COVID-19 globally, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The data shows that the death toll from the disease reached 1,000,555 on Tuesday after thousands more died in the last 24 hours.

The United States remains the worst hit as it accounts for one in every five COVID-19 patients that have died.

The US has reported 205,031 deaths, followed by Brazil with 142,058 deaths, and India — 95,542 deaths.

Mexico and the United Kingdom are also among the worst hit with 76,430 and 42,090 deaths respectively.

As of Monday night, Nigeria recorded 58,460 COVID-19 cases, but only 7,454, representing 12.7 percent of them are still active; at least 1,111 have died while roughly 50,000 have recovered.

The global death toll constitutes three percent of the more than 33.3 million people that have so far been infected with the coronavirus. Roughly 74 percent of those — 24,893,395 patients — have recovered.

The sour landmark comes about nine months after the first death from the virus was recorded in China on January 11.

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, described it as “an agonising milestone”.

“Yet we must never lose sight of each and every individual life,” he said.

“They were fathers and mothers, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues. The pain has been multiplied by the savageness of this disease.”

The disease has already spread to 188 countries while lockdowns and other measures introduced to slow its spread have thrown economies across the world into recession.

The race for survival against the pandemic is getting more intense with about 240 potential vaccines in the pipeline.

The BBC is reporting that nine of those vaccines are in the final stage of testing as scientists continue to work hard to beat the usual years-long timeline for the production of a vaccine.