Madrid.- They are fulfilled five years since the March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization (OMS) declared the pandemic for the COVID-19, a five-year period in which the world has had to learn how to cope the worst health emergency in the last hundred years.
The figures of deaths, infections and vaccinations are dizzying, as are the data that point to the coronavirus as the cause of the biggest economic recession since the Great Depression.
More than 7 million dead
Official data on the number of people who have died from Covid-19 amounts to more than seven million people worldwide (7,083,769 in WHO report of January 5, 2025), although the UN speaks of a figure several times higher: at least 20 million.
Another source used during the pandemic, that of Johns Hopkins University, put the number of deaths up to October 3, 2023, when it stopped collecting data, at 6,881,955.
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Most of the deaths occurred in 2020 and 2021, a total of 5.49 million, although the WHO estimates the global excess mortality for that period at 14.91 million.
The peak of weekly deaths occurred in January 2021, with around 99,000 deaths per week worldwide. And that year was the deadliest, with 3.52 million deaths.
Deaths by age group
The People over 65 years of age were the group where the highest number of deaths were concentrated, between 54% and 85% of the total until April 2022, and 88% of the total since then.
Only 0.2% of those who died from Covid were under 15 years old.
Almost 800 million infections
Since December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health and Sanitation Commission (Hubei Province, China) reported to the WHO 27 cases, related to a wholesale market in the aforementioned city, of pneumonia of unknown etiology, until a month later (January 30, 2020) when the international public health emergency was declared, the number of infected people in the world did not stop growing.
Five years later, the WHO estimates that there are 777.3 million confirmed cases of Covid, with 2022 being the year with the highest number of infections: 445 million.
Hospitalizations
The number of people hospitalized The number of people who have been hospitalized for Covid since the start of the pandemic has risen to 28.1 million. The peak was reached in early 2021, when 526,000 people were admitted to hospital every week worldwide, according to the WHO.
The peak of ICU admissions was reached in June 2021, when 245 people for every 1,000 hospitalized were admitted to the ICU. By November 2024, the figure had decreased to 41 admissions per 1,000 hospitalizations.
Vaccines
It took less than a year to achieve vaccines against the coronavirus when the usual process takes between four and seven years.
Between 2020 and the end of 2023, when WHO stopped counting, 13.64 billion vaccines had been administered worldwide. 67% of the population had been vaccinated with a complete primary series and 32% had received at least one booster dose.
In low-income countries, only 5% of the population received booster doses, compared to 49% in high-income countries.
The American pharmaceutical company Pfizer/BioNTech It was the first to synthesize a vaccine, which began to be inoculated in the United Kingdom on December 8, from the 14th in the United States and then continued in the EU and other countries.
The following vaccines were signed by the laboratories Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax, VLA2001, Sanofi and GSK. The last to arrive was from the Spanish multinational Hipra, in 2023.
The Russian vaccine, Sputnik-V, was presented in August 2020 by President Vladimir Putin.
China provided the Sinopharm (from Sinovac Biotech) and RDB vaccines, known for their low cost, and India put its Covaxin vaccine on the market.
Persistent Covid
The WHO estimates that 6% of symptomatic covid cases became persistent covid, which describes a situation in which symptoms persist for weeks or months after the initial infection or reappear after a period of absence of symptoms.
Its appearance is not related to the severity of the initial infection, so it can affect patients with mild or severe disease.
Masks
Global sales of protective masks and respirators reached a value of about $379 billion in 2020. Before the pandemic, in 2019, the sum was just over $12 billion, according to data from Statista Consumer Market Insights.
In 2021, sales value was halved due to the expansion of supply.
In the early stages of the pandemic, the world used 129 billion masks and 65 billion gloves each month, according to data from the American Chemical Society.
The biggest recession since the 1929 crisis
He population confinement and the suspension of economic activity triggered the biggest recession since the Great Depression of 1929, with the global economy falling by 3.3% in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The fall was particularly strong in the EU, where GDP contracted by 6.4% in 2020, and in Latin America by 7%. In the United States, the fall was 3.5% and in Japan, 4.8%.
Among the major economies, the declines were led by Spain, with 10.8%; the United Kingdom, with 10.3%; Argentina, with 9.9%; Italy, with 8.9%; France, with 8.2%; and Germany, with 5%. Of the major powers, only China escaped recession with growth of 2.2% in 2020.
Global debt soared to 98% of GDP in 2020.
Tourism, the worst-off sector
One of the most affected productive sectors was the tourism. 2020 was the worst year in its history: losses of 1.07 trillion euros (1.3 trillion dollars) and one billion fewer international arrivals, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
The number of tourists fell by 74% in 2020 compared to the previous year. Europe was down 70%, the Middle East and Africa 75%, America 69%, and Asia and the Pacific 84%. Spain returned to 1995 levels, with a 69% drop.
In 2022 the international tourism It still only reached 63% of pre-pandemic levels, in 2023 it approached 90% and in 2024 it recovered to pre-pandemic levels.
