The coronavirus pandemic has swept the globe, resulting in nationwide lockdowns in countries from Italy to El Salvador
Hundreds of thousands of people have been diagnosed with the virus around the world, and even though China has reported a decline in cases of Covid-19, much of the rest of the world has yet to reach that milestone. Indeed, Italy has reported more deaths than China, the country which was the epicentre of the outbreak, with 3,405 total deaths making it the country worst-affected by the virus.
As the outbreak continues, here are the latest figures on how many people have died of coronavirus all over the world, and how that figure compares with that of the flu. How many people have died of coronavirus worldwide? According to Johns Hopkins University, which has been monitoring the outbreak since it began in late 2019, the coronavirus death toll has now passed 10,000.
Meanwhile, at the time of writing, more than 86,000 of the over 244,500 people who have been diagnosed with the virus have recovered.
How does the coronavirus death toll compare with seasonal flu?
According to the World Health Organisation, there are roughly 290,000 – 650,000 ‘respiratory deaths’ from the flu each year worldwide. The WHO website states: ‘Illnesses range from mild to severe and even death.
Hospitalisation and death occur mainly among high-risk groups. ‘Worldwide, these annual epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.’
England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty has warned that because the UK is mainly testing the most serious cases of the virus which end up needing care in hospital, the proportion of those patients who end up dying of coronavirus would be higher. He said: ‘There will be a period until we’ve ramped our testing up in the community where if you just divide the number of cases we identify by the number of people who die, it will look as if the mortality rate in the UK will be quite high. ‘I am expecting that to happen.
That’s because that is the way we are collecting the denominators is people who have severe or fairly severe disease, rather than all comers. Over time, that will shift.
