More people died of malaria in 2020 than in 2019. Here's why
El Salvador and China have now been declared malaria-free.
That's one of the encouraging takeaways from the new annual report on malaria issued on Monday by the World Health Organization. But the sobering news is that despite progress in some countries, this debilitating and lethal disease took a greater toll in 2020 than in the recent past.
The number of cases and deaths were up in 2020, compared to 2019. Overall, cases jumped from 227 million in 2019 to 241 million in 2020. Deaths went from 558,000 to 627,000.
The pandemic shoulders some of the responsibility â but it's not just that.
"We became a little too complacent," says Dr. Pedro Alonso, director of the Global Malaria Programme at the World Health Organization in Geneva since 2014 and a malariologist for nearly four decades.
In the
