A look at COVID-19’s effects as deaths hit 1 million (Photos)

As one million coronavirus related deaths have been recorded worldwide to date, the pandemic is far from over with the toll continuing to climb.

As it made its way across the globe this year, the coronavirus pandemic sank economies and transformed social interaction. It shut schools and businesses, stopped the sports and entertainment industries dead in their tracks, and even brought down the Olympic Games.

And it killed. One million deaths have been recorded worldwide to date, according to data tracked by Johns Hopkins University.

The effects were global – but also personal. The virus changed how people socialised and shopped, worked and dressed. It changed how they cared for their loved ones and how they mourned them.

It even changed the language they used. The word “hero” was employed with more frequency – and the definition expanded to include delivery and sanitation workers, cleaners and waiters. And, of course, healthcare workers, who in China and Italy, Iran and South Africa, the United States and Brazil toiled in hazmat suits for hours on end to treat the sick.

The virus changed how people interacted and how they thought about interaction. People isolated to stay healthy – and then worried about what isolation was doing to their health.

In Spain, one of the hardest-hit countries, nursing home residents were shut off from the outside world for months in an effort to protect them. When visitors were allowed again, husbands and wives pressed lips to plastic sheeting for several minutes; mothers and daughters clutched each other through the film.

Many people were unable to say goodbye to their loved ones because of restrictions at hospitals; others held them in their final moments, draped head-to-toe in protective gear. Funerals were small and sterile affairs – if they happened at all.

And still the pandemic is far from over. The death toll is climbing by about 5,000 a day, a death every 17 seconds somewhere in the world.

Graves are decorated with crosses in a section of the Valle de Chalco Municipal Cemetery, which opened early on in the coronavirus pandemic to accommodate the surge in deaths, on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Healthcare workers wearing personal protective equipment carry the body of a COVID-19 victim for cremation in Gauhati, India, on September 10, 2020.

Funeral home workers carry the coffin of a woman who died from COVID-19 into a hearse in Katlehong, near Johannesburg, South Africa, on July 21, 2020.

Sabatino Di Girolamo, centre, mayor of Roseto degli Abruzzi, with his son Francesco, right, and his sister Marisa Di Felice, mourning the death of their mother and grandmother Annunziata, laid in state in the morgue of the Giuseppe Mazzini Hospital in Teramo, central Italy, on Tuesday, May 12, 2020.

Piedrangel funeral home worker Anibal Rosado prepares to help deliver to relatives urns that contain the cremated ashes of people who are suspected to have died from the new coronavirus, in Lima, Peru, on Monday, May 4, 2020.

An elderly woman, a patient with coronavirus, breathes with an oxygen mask inside a hospital in Pochaiv, Ukraine, on May 1, 2020.

Women wearing protective clothing and ‘chador’, a head-to-toe garment, arrive at a cemetery to prepare the body of a victim who died from the new coronavirus for a funeral, in the city of Ghaemshahr, in north of Iran, on Thursday, April 30, 2020.

Francisco Espana, 60, looks at the Mediterranean Sea from a promenade next to the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, Spain, on Friday, September 4, 2020. Francisco spent 52 days in the Intensive Care Unit due to coronavirus, but today he was allowed by his doctors to spend almost 10 minutes at the seaside as part of his recovery therapy.

Romelia Navarro, 64, weeps while hugging her husband, Antonio, in his final moments in a COVID-19 unit at St Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California, on Friday, July 31, 2020.

Tri Novia Septiani cries during an online memorial service marking the 40th day since the death of her fiance Dr Michael Robert Marampe who died of COVID-19, in Jakarta, Indonesia, on June 5, 2020.

Agustina Canamero, 81, and Pascual Peerez, 84, hug and kiss through a plastic film screen to avoid contracting the new coronavirus at a nursing home in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, June 22, 2020.

SOS Funeral workers transport by boat the coffin of an 86-year-old woman who lived by the Negro River and who is suspected to have died of COVID-19, near Manaus, Brazil, on Thursday, May 14, 2020.

Josefa Ribas, 86, who is bedridden, looks at nurse Alba Rodriguez as Ribas’ husband, Jose Marcos, 89, stands by in their home in Barcelona, Spain, on March 30, 2020. Ribas suffers from dementia, and Marcos fears for them both if the virus enters their home. ‘If I get the virus, who will take care of my wife?’