The global toll of deaths from coronavirus has now passed one million.
The deadly virus has dominated this year, wreaking havoc on the economy and forcing major changes to the way society operates in a bid to curb the spread.
In Liverpool, the latest figures show there were 1,306 positive coronavirus cases in the most recent seven day period.
This is an increase from 577 the week before and provides a current infection rate of 262.2 per 100,000 residents.
The global toll, compiled by Johns Hopkins University in America, passed over into seven figures in the early hours of Tuesday, September 29.
PA reports Dr Howard Markel, of the University of Michigan, said: "It's not just a number. It's human beings. It's people we love."
The professor of medical history, who has advised government officials on containing pandemics and lost his 84-year-old mother to Covid-19 in February, added: "It's our brothers, our sisters. It's people we know.
"And if you don't have that human factor right in your face, it's very easy to make it abstract."
The bleak milestone represents more than four times the number of people killed in the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
However, the true figure is thought to be larger owing to inadequate or inconsistent testing and reporting and suspected concealment by some countries.
The death toll continues to grow, with nearly 5,000 more deaths reported each day.
Parts of Europe are getting hit by a second wave, and experts fear the same fate may await the US, which accounts for about 205,000 deaths, or a fifth of those worldwide.
The virus first appeared in late 2019 in patients being cared for in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first death was reported on January 11.
By the time authorities locked down the city nearly two weeks later, millions of travellers had come and gone and China's government has come in for criticism that it did not do enough to alert other countries to the threat.
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Government leaders in countries like Germany, South Korea and New Zealand worked effectively to contain it.
Others, like US President Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, dismissed the severity of the threat and the guidance of scientists, even as hospitals filled with gravely ill patients.
Brazil has recorded the second most deaths after the US, with about 142,000. India is third and Mexico fourth, with more than 76,000.
The virus has forced trade-offs between safety and economic well-being and the choices made have left millions of people vulnerable, especially the poor, minorities and the elderly.
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The pandemic's toll of one million dead in such a limited time rivals some of the gravest threats to public health, past and present.
The toll is approaching the 1.5 million global deaths each year from tuberculosis, which regularly kills more people than any other infectious disease.
Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, said: "Covid's grip on humanity is incomparably greater than the grip of other causes of death.
"We're only at the beginning of this. We're going to see many more weeks ahead of this pandemic than we've had behind us."
