Southeast Asia has recorded twice as many COVID-related fatalities as North America over the past two weeks, according to the Red Cross, which warned wealthier countries that they must urgently share their vaccine supplies.
The more aggressive Delta variant, combined with a lack of vaccines, is driving record outbreaks in countries across the region - from Vietnam to Thailand, Malaysia and Myanmar. Indonesia, the worst hit, has one of the highest daily death tolls in the world, with 1,466 deaths reported on average over the past seven days.
Alexander Matheou, the Asia Pacific director of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies (IFRC), said it was feared that fatalities will increase further.
“This COVID-19 surge driven by the Delta variant is claiming a tragic toll on families across Southeast Asia and it’s far from over. We fear that as the virus spreads from cities to regional and rural areas that many more lives will be lost among the unvaccinated,” he said.
For the past two weeks, COVID fatalities in Southeast Asia have been higher than in any other region, according to IFRC, though the organisation cautioned that discrepancies in data collection complicate such comparisons.
Southeast Asia has recorded 38,522 deaths from COVID-19 in the past fortnight, nearly twice as many as North America, according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 data cited by IFRC.
Over the same period, Europe recorded 22,102 deaths, South America recorded 19,356 and Middle East and Africa recorded 21,216.
“Vaccinations are at record rates in some countries, yet many Southeast Asian nations have low portions of the population fully vaccinated and are languishing far behind western Europe and North America,” said Matheou.
European countries such as the UK, Spain, Germany and Italy, have fully vaccinated at least 57 percent of their population, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data.
By contrast, Vietnam has fully vaccinated less than 2 percent of its population, Thailand 7.5 percent, Indonesia 10.5 percent and the Philippines 11.6 percent. Malaysia has fully vaccinated more than one third of its population.
Much of the region managed to contain the worst of the outbreak last year, through firm border controls, lockdown measures and contact tracing.
However, the more infectious Delta variant has proved much harder to contain, while some governments have been reluctant to reintroduce full lockdowns, fearing the economic cost. - The Guardian