The tally of lives lost over the past year-and-a-half is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world's wars since 1982.
The global death toll from COVID-19 has eclipsed four million as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious Delta variant.
But in recent weeks, the mutant Delta version of the virus first identified in India has set off alarms around the world, spreading rapidly even in vaccination success stories like the US, Britain and Israel. At the same time, the disaster has exposed the gap between the haves and the have-nots, with vaccination drives barely getting started in Africa and other desperately poor corners of the world because of extreme shortages of shots.