Global death toll from Covid-19 passes four million

A health worker administers a jab of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine during a vaccination drive for people ages 30 to 39 in Mexico City (Marco Ugarte/AP)

The global death toll from Covid-19 has passed four million as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and the highly contagious delta variant.

The tally of lives lost over the past year and a half, as compiled from official sources by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the number of people killed in battle in all of the world’s wars since 1982, according to estimates from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.