LONDON : The number of people who have died with or from COVID has varied greatly around the world. Peru, the world’s worst-affected country, has had 6,067 COVID deaths for every million inhabitants and 88,345 recorded cases per million people.
Roughly one in every 15 people who has caught COVID in Peru has died. At the other end of the spectrum there’s New Zealand. It’s had only 10 deaths and 3,136 cases for every million people, meaning only one in every 313 COVID cases in New Zealand ended with the person dying.
In between there are countries that have had a relatively high number of infections but which have still managed to keep their death numbers low – countries like Japan.
It’s had 17,612 infections per million people yet only 146 deaths per million. This is despite almost one in three people in Japan being over the age of 65 and so at greater risk of severe COVID (the average age of people dying from COVID is over 80).