​The COVID-19 pandemic has caused another million deaths worldwide since January this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Thursday, Barrons and Agerpres reported.

“Since the beginning of this year, we have passed the tragic mark of 1 million deaths from COVID-19,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference.

He called on governments around the world to step up their efforts to vaccinate all healthcare workers, the elderly, and those most at risk, in order to reach 70% of the world’s population.

In January 2022, WHO, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and their partners launched the COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Partnership (CoVDP) to facilitate the distribution of doses in 34 countries where vaccination coverage was below 10%.

Almost all of these countries, except for six of them, are in Africa. A notable exception is North Korea, which faced a devastating wave this spring despite extreme isolation imposed by Pyongyang.

Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un only declared “victory” over COVID in August.

WHO says the fight against the pandemic is not over

Currently, as announced by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, only 10 countries still have less than 10% vaccination coverage.

“However, much remains to be done,” he added.

A third of the world’s population is still unvaccinated against the new coronavirus, including two-thirds of health workers and three-quarters of the elderly in low-income countries, according to the WHO director.

According to the latest statistics published by the WHO, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused 6.45 million deaths worldwide since the first cases appeared in late 2019 in the Wuhan region of China.