Worldwide deaths related to COVID-19 surpassed 5 million on Friday, according to a Reuters tally, with unvaccinated people particularly exposed to the variant Delta wave.
The Delta variant is now the dominant strain around the globe and has been reported in 187 out of 194 World Health Organization member countries.
More than half of all global deaths reported on a seven-day average were in the United States, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and India.
The COVID-19 death toll took over a year to hit 2.5 million, while the next 2.5 million deaths were recorded in just under eight months, according to a Reuters analysis.
An average of five deaths every minute was recorded across the world last week. However, the global death rate has been slowing in recent weeks.
The pandemic has exposed the wide disparities in vaccination rates between rich and poor nations, and the upshot of vaccine hesitancy in some nations, and the anti-vaxxers movement that suspect the efficiency of the shots.
More than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.
The World Health Organization this week said its COVAX distribution program would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.
COVAX, co-led by the WHO, has since January largely allocated doses proportionally among its 140-plus beneficiary states according to population size.
The United States, which has been battling vaccine misinformation that has caused about one-third of the population to avoid vaccination, surpassed 700,000 deaths on Friday, the highest toll of any country.
Russia reported 887 coronavirus-related deaths on Friday, the largest single-day death toll it has recorded since the pandemic began and the fourth day in a row it has set that record. Only 33% of Russia’s eligible population has received a first vaccine dose.
However, India, one of the first countries ravaged by the Delta variant, has gone from an average of 4,000 deaths a day to less than 300 as its vaccination campaign is rolled out.
About 47% of India’s eligible population has received the first shot, with officials administering around 7,896,950 doses per day over the past week, a Reuters analysis of Our World in Data showed.
In Morocco, a total of 22,719,086 received their first Covid-19 vaccine shot, while over 19 million people were fully vaccinated by Friday, according to the ministry of health.
The Moroccan kingdom announced on Friday that it will begin administering a third booster shot of the Covid-19 vaccine especially for people over 65 years of age and those suffering from chronic diseases and front-line workers.
According to the data of the Moroccan Ministry of Health, Morocco’s epidemic curve continues on its downward trend for the seventh week in a row, as the country retreated from recording 15,000 positive cases per week to less than 10,000 cases, an estimated decrease of 36 percent.
As a region, South America has the highest death toll in the world accounting for 21% of all reported deaths, followed by North America and Eastern Europe contributing more than 14% of all fatalities each, according to Reuters analysis.
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