Health Experts Send Alarm: Covid Pandemic May Cause Humanitarian Catastrophe

World leaders have been warned that unless they act with extreme urgency, the Covid-19 pandemic will overwhelm health services in many nations in South America, Asia, and Africa over the next few weeks.

Only billions of pounds of aid and massive exports of vaccines can halt a humanitarian catastrophe that is now unfolding rapidly across the planet, scientists and world health experts said.

They fear that the terrible scenes now unfolding in India - where people are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes, while car parks are being turned into cremation grounds - could be repeated in many other economically fragile nations. Their fates now contrast sharply with those of well vaccinated countries such as the UK and the US where lockdowns are being lifted.

In the UK, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has come in for particular criticism over his recent decision to cut overseas aid during the pandemic. This has only worsened the calamity that is enveloping low and middle income countries, it is claimed.

India's surging death rate is driving a record shift in the burden of global Covid-19 deaths to poor and lower-middle income countries, according to Observer analysis, in what may be the start of a longer-term shift towards a greater concentration of virus deaths in the global south as wealthier nations begin to vaccinate their way out of the crisis.

Nearly one in three (30.7%) recorded deaths from Covid-19 worldwide are now occurring in poor and lower-middle income countries - a month ago they accounted for only 9.3% of global deaths.

But India is not alone in driving the shift, with higher Covid-19 death rates in countries such as Kenya (where mortality is up 674% since the end of January), Djibouti...