White flags representing people who have died of Covid-19 in Brazil in a visual protest outside the National Congress in Brasilia
(Picture: AP)The global death toll from Covid-19 has topped five million, figures show.
The grim milestone comes less than two years into a crisis that has brought the world to a standstill and caused untold devastation.
Together, the US, the European Union, UK and Brazil account for one-eighth of the world's population, but nearly half of all reported deaths.
It comes as the UK recorded 38,009 coronavirus cases and 74 related deaths in the latest 24-hour period.
In the past two years the UK has accounted for more than nine million cases with 141,000 deaths.
Research from Johns Hopkins University found that the US alone has recorded more than 740,000 lives lost, the highest of any nation.
Dr Albert Ko, an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health, said: “This is a defining moment in our lifetime.
“What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don't get to another five million?”
The death toll is about equal to the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined.
It rivals the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Globally, Covid-19 is now the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and stroke.
The staggering figure is almost certainly an undercount because of limited testing and people dying at home without medical attention, especially in poor parts of the world.
Coronavirus hot spots have shifted over the 22 months since the outbreak began, turning different places on the world map red.
Now, the virus is wreaking havoc in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe as misinformation and distrust continues to hamper vaccination efforts in these areas.
In Ukraine, only 17 per cent of the adult population is fully vaccinated; in Armenia, only seven per cent.
Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, director of Icap, a global health centre at Columbia University, said: “What’s uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries. That's the irony of Covid-19.”
Wealthier nations with longer life expectancies have larger proportions of older people, cancer survivors and nursing home residents, all of whom are especially vulnerable to COVID-19, Dr El-Sadr noted.
Poorer countries tend to have larger shares of children, teenagers and young adults, who are less likely to fall seriously ill from the coronavirus.
Africa remains the world’s least vaccinated region, with just 5% of the population of 1.3 billion people fully covered.
It comes as the NHS Confederation and the British Medical Association warn Boris Johnson to urgently implement “Plan B” to help curb rising infection rates in England.
Plan B includes face masks in certain settings, a return to work from home and potentially vaccine passports.
