Madrid.- They are met five years since the March 11, 2020 la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) declared the pandemic by the covid-19, a five-year period in which the world has had to learn how to cope with the worst health emergency of the last hundred years.
The figures for deaths, infections, or vaccines administered are dizzying, as are the data pointing to the coronavirus as the cause of the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression.
Más de 7 millones de muertos
Official figures for the number of people who died from covid-19 amount 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 that has been used during the pandemic, that of Johns Hopkins University, put the death toll at 6,881,955 until October 3, 2023, when it stopped collecting data.
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Most deaths occurred in 2020 and 2021, totaling 5.49 million, although the WHO estimates global excess mortality for that period at 14.91 million.
El pico de muertes semanales se produjo en enero de 2021, con alrededor de 99.000 muertes a la semana en el mundo. Y ese año fue el de más muertos, con 3,52 millones de fallecimientos.
Muertos por grupos de edad
The People over 65 years of age were the group where the highest number of deaths was concentrated, between 54% and 85% of the total until April 2022, and 88% of the total since then.
Only 0.2% of COVID-19 deaths were in people under 15 years old.
Casi 800 millones de contagios
Since December 31, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Commission of Health and Sanitation (Hubei Province, China) It reported to the WHO about 27 cases, related to a wholesale market in the aforementioned city, of pneumonia of unknown etiology, until a month later (January 30, 2020) 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 777.3 million confirmed cases of covid, with 2022 being the year with the most infections: 445 million.
Hospitalizaciones
The number of hospitalized people The number of deaths due to Covid since the beginning of the pandemic totals 28.1 million. The peak was reached in early 2021, when 526,000 people were admitted to hospital weekly worldwide, according to the WHO.
The peak of ICU income It was reached in June 2021, when 245 people out of every 1,000 hospitalized entered the ICU. In November 2024, the figure had decreased to 41 admissions per 1,000 hospitalizations.
Vacunas
It took less than a year to achieve vaccines against the coronavirus when the usual process is between four and seven years.
Between 2020 and the end of 2023, when the 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.
La 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 USA and then continued in the EU and other countries.
The following vaccines were signed by the Moderna, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Novavax, VLA2001, Sanofi and GSK laboratories. The last to arrive was that of the Spanish multinational Hipra, in 2023.
La vacuna rusa, Sputnik-V, fue presentada en agosto de 2020 por el presidente, Vladimir Putin.
China aportó las vacunas Sinopharm (de Sinovac Biotech) y la RDB, conocida por su bajo coste, e India puso en el mercado su vacuna Covaxin.
Covid persistente
The WHO estimates that the 6% of symptomatic covid cases became long covid, which describes a situation where symptoms persist for weeks or months after the initial infection or reappear after a period without them.
Its appearance is not related to the severity of the initial infection, so it can affect both mild and severe patients.
Mascarillas
Global sales of protective masks and respirators reached a value of approximately 379 billion dollars In 2020. Before the pandemic, in 2019, the sum was just over $12 billion, according to Statista Consumer Market Insights data.
In 2021, the value of sales 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.
La mayor recesión desde la crisis de 1929
El population confinement y la suspensión de la actividad económica It triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression of 1929, with a 3.3% drop in the global economy during 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The fall had a particularly significant impact on 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 most important economies, the biggest 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 avoided recession, with growth of 2.2% in 2020.
Global debt soared to 98% of GDP in 2020.
El turismo, el sector peor parado
One of the most affected productive sectors was the turismo2020 was the worst year in its history: losses of €1.07 trillion ($1.3 trillion) and one billion fewer international arrivals, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO).
The volume of tourists fell by 74% in 2020 compared to the previous year. Europe saw a 70% decrease; the Middle East and Africa a 75%; the Americas, a 69%, and Asia and the Pacific, an 84% decrease. Spain returned to 1995 values, with a 69% decrease.
In 2022 the international tourism todavía solo alcanzaba el 63 % de los niveles prepandemia, en 2023 se acercó al 90 % y en 2024 recuperó los niveles previos.
