DICING WITH DEATH

The number of people who have died from Covid-19 in the two years since it emerged has now passed six million – an unfathomable toll given the relative sophistication of life in the 21st century.

The real figure could be much higher. But it is still dwarfed by the toll from a virulent strain of influenza that killed 50 million people in the brief period between March 1918 and early 1919. Hundreds of millions more became sick from the so-called Spanish flu. The strain was particularly severe for young adults, and in June 1918, half a million German soldiers fell ill. World War I supersized the pandemic by easing its passage around a world that didn’t yet have passenger aeroplanes. In the US, about 675,000 people died, at a time when the population was a third of its current size.

Covid has been tragic. But without the advent of better hospitals, improved public hygiene and – crucially and unprecedentedly – a vaccine developed within 12 months, the death toll in a globalised world linked as never before could have truly catastrophic.

Vaccines have been key to our survival as a modern species.