The global coronavirus has claimed at least 200,568 on Saturday as the United Nations launched an international push for a vaccine to defeat the pandemic. Governments around the world are struggling to limit the economic devastation unleashed by the virus, which has infected nearly 2.8 million people and left half of humanity under some form of lockdown.
The United States is the hardest-hit country by far in the pandemic, recording 52,869 deaths and more than 930,171 infections.
The virus has killed over 120,00 people in Europe with more than three quarters of those fatalities in Italy, France, Spain and Britain, according to an AFP tally on Saturday using official figures.
With 120,140 deaths and 1,344,172 cases, Europe is the continent hardest hit by the pandemic that emerged late last year. Italy has the most deaths with 26,384 followed by Spain with 22,902, France with 22,245 and Britain with 20,319.
The scale of the pandemic has forced medical research on the virus to move at unprecedented speed, but effective treatments are still far away and the United Nations chief said the effort will require cooperation on a global scale.
“ We face a global public enemy like no other,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a virtual briefing on Friday, asking for international organisations, world leaders and the private sector to join hands.
“ A world free of COVID-19 requires the most massive public health effort in history.”
The vaccine should be safe, affordable and available to all, Guterres stressed at the meeting, which was also attended by the leaders of Germany and France.
But notably absent from the meeting were the leaders of China, where the virus first emerged late last year, and the United States, which has accused the UN’s World Health Organization of not warning quickly enough about the original outbreak.