The worldwide death toll from COVID-19 has eclipsed 4 million as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant.
The tally was compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University.
The count of lives lost over the past year and a half is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world’s wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
The death count is three times the number of people killed in traffic accidents every year and about equal to the population of Los Angeles.
Even then, it is widely believed to be an undercount because of overlooked cases or deliberate concealment.
With the advent of the vaccine, deaths per day have plummeted to around 7,900, after topping out at over 18,000 a day in January.
But in recent weeks, the delta variant first identified in India has set off alarms. Vaccination drives are barely getting started in Africa and other desperately poor corners of the world because of extreme shortages of shots. The U.S. and other wealthy countries have agreed to share at least 1 billion doses with struggling countries.
The U.S. has the world’s highest reported death toll, at over 600,000, followed by Brazil at more than 520,000, though the real numbers are believed to be much higher in the South American country.