Coronavirus deaths this year surpass 2020 total

The coronavirus pandemic has already killed more people this year than in all of 2020, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data collected by John Hopkins University.

The newspaper found that about 1.883 million people have died from the virus in 2021, compared with 1.88 million last year.

This year’s COVID-19 death toll surpassed the 2020 total on Thursday, according to the Journal.

Around 3.7 million people have succumbed to the virus since it first emerged.

The figures underscore the divide between countries that have access to the vaccine and those that are struggling to acquire doses. As of Wednesday, around 2 percent of people in Africa had received at least one dose of the vaccine according to Our World In Data. Almost 7 percent of individuals in Asia had received at least one dose, while in North America that figure was closer to 40 percent.

President Biden announced on Thursday that the United States would donate 500 million doses to countries in need. But an initiative supported by the U.S. to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines — in an effort to help developing countries manufacture the vaccine — is still facing pushback from the European Union.