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On a Thursday night in early January, the disease that would become known as Covid-19 claimed its first victim, a 61-year-old man who succumbed to the newly identified coronavirus in the city of Wuhan, in the People's Republic of China. Nine months later, the pandemic took its millionth life. And while the vagaries of record-keeping mean we may never know who that victim was, the fact remains: Covid has killed a million people. Tens of millions of things undone. Daughters and sons unborn, works of genius uncreated. Pieces of communities — excised. Entire residential complexes filled with older people — ravaged. Human contribution melted away, with no way of ever knowing or chronicling what was lost. Accounting for what's missing when people die is never an easy task; now it is one multiplied by an entire million. Advertisement A new AP interactive map of the coronavirus' spread — represented by the lives it has claimed — blends data and geography in a way that forces us to see what has happened to the world. And what is still happening to it. The path of Covid-19 to a million deaths. Like so many things in the world, it started small. At first, the map shows only one splash of colour: China, the place where the coronavirus silently began its march. As it began to move around, the map evolved. Month by month, week by week, day by day, the coronavirus spread. Pandemic was declared. Hospitals girded. Cities and countries, shut down. The world changed so fast that its people could barely keep up. How did something so contained at first, so localised, upend the routines and activities of huge chunks of human civilisation? We all have watched it, lived through it, but the visual is striking. From a world largely unsullied by the virus to one merely touched by it to an entire planet feeling its effects. Some of the hardest hit countries. — March 18, 2020 China still leads the world in deaths. In the United States, President Donald Trump has just declared a state of emergency. The US has lost 191 people. The wide belief among Americans: This can still be contained. Advertisement — April 6, 2020Italy is being ravaged; 16,523 have been lost. China has dropped out of the top five when it comes to deaths. The US is second by now at 14,199 dead. — May 22, 2020The US has shot ahead of the rest of the world and sits on the cusp of 100,000 dead — 99,166. It, like the United Kingdom (35,440), Italy (32,616), Spain (28626) and France (28,292), is rendered in a darker forest green, along with Brazil. The march is accelerating. — July 26, 2020In the heart of the summer, the US remains the country with the most dead: 147,656. Brazil, whose president has just tested positive for coronavirus, is second at 87,004. Darker greens are starting to fill the map, including in India. In China, blamed by Trump for the virus in terms some deem racist, the hue is light after strict and protracted containment measures. — Sept. 27, 2020India is third in the world with 95,542 deaths. The United States, still No. 1 and criticised for its haphazard efforts at containment, has just passed the 200,000 mark. Brazil sits at 141,741, with no apparent detrimental political effect on its leader. Russia is now darker green. Africa, Australia and much of Asia are lighter, though swaths of Southeast Asia are showing higher death rates. Olivia Troye, a former adviser on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, recounts her "nightmare to tell," saying there was an organized effort to seek data to underplay the danger of coronavirus for certain populations, ages and demographics. https://t.co/Ep0fGPozYc pic.twitter.com/U0sRWpnQiK — Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) September 29, 2020 This map tells the story of an invisible virus that upended the world. It tells of first responses and fear and decisions good and bad. Stories of valiant women and men who tried to stop it, and were sometimes claimed by their efforts. It tells stories of leaders who measured up and leaders who didn't. And how simple human touch ended up killing. Advertisement Most of all, it tells of the one million dead and gone. These are the stories of the human beings who, had they been able to stick around, might have done things we'd all remember — or might have done things just as important that only a few people they loved would remember. The map contains their stories, too, and even amid the elegant lines of the map and the illuminating contours of the data they should not be forgotten. - Ted Anthony, director of digital innovation for AP, oversees the news organisation's coverage of the pandemic's ripple effect on society. - AP

The worldwide death toll from the coronavirus eclipsed 1 million today, nine months into a crisis that has devastated the global economy, tested world leaders' resolve, pitted science against politics and forced multitudes to change the way they live, learn and work. "It's not just a number. It's human beings. It's people we love," said Dr Howard Markel, a professor of medical history at the University of Michigan who has advised government officials on containing pandemics and lost his 84-year-old mother to Covid-19 in February. "It's our brothers, our sisters. It's people we know," he added. "And if you don't have that human factor right in your face, it's very easy to make it abstract." The bleak milestone, recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Jerusalem or Austin, Texas. It is 2.5 times the sea of humanity that was at Woodstock in 1969. It is more than four times the number killed in the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Advertisement Even then, the figure is almost certainly a vast undercount because of inadequate or inconsistent testing and reporting and suspected concealment by some countries. And the number continues to mount. Nearly 5000 deaths are reported each day on average. Parts of Europe are getting hit by a second wave, and experts fear the same fate may await the US, which accounts for about 205,000 deaths, or 1 out of 5 worldwide. That is far more than any other country, despite America's wealth and medical resources. Spencer Cushing, 29, tends to David Feinour, a 71-year-old Covid-19 patient, at St. Jude Medical Centre in Fullerton, California. Photo / AP "I can understand why ... numbers are losing their power to shock, but I still think it's really important that we understand how big these numbers really are," said Mark Honigsbaum, author of "The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris". The global toll includes people like Joginder Chaudhary, who was his parents' greatest pride, raised with the little they earned farming a half-acre plot in central India to become the first doctor from their village. After the virus killed the 27-year-old Chaudhary in late July, his mother wept inconsolably. With her son gone, Premlata Chaudhary said, how could she go on living? Three weeks later, on August 18, the virus took her life, too. All told, it has killed more than 95,000 in India. "This pandemic has ruined my family," said the young doctor's father, Rajendra Chaudhary. "All our aspirations, our dreams, everything is finished." When the virus overwhelmed cemeteries in the Italian province of Bergamo last spring, the Reverend Mario Carminati opened his church to the dead, lining up 80 coffins in the centre aisle. After an army convoy carted them to a crematory, another 80 arrived. Then 80 more. Eventually the crisis receded and the world's attention moved on. But the pandemic's grasp endures. In August, Carminati buried his 34-year-old nephew. Advertisement Cemetery workers in protective clothing bury three victims of Covid-19 at the Vila Formosa cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Photo / AP "This thing should make us all reflect. The problem is that we think we're all immortal," the priest said. The virus first appeared in late 2019 in patients hospitalised in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first death was reported on January 11. By the time authorities locked down the city nearly two weeks later, millions of travelers had come and gone. China's government has come in for criticism that it did not do enough to alert other countries to the threat. Government leaders in countries like Germany, South Korea and New Zealand worked effectively to contain it. Others, like US President Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, dismissed the severity of the threat and the guidance of scientists, even as hospitals filled with gravely ill patients. Brazil has recorded the second most deaths after the US, with about 142,000. India is third and Mexico fourth, with more than 76,000. The virus has forced trade-offs between safety and economic wellbeing. The choices made have left millions of people vulnerable, especially the poor, minorities and the elderly. With so many of the deaths beyond view in hospital wards and clustered on society's margins, the milestone recalls the grim pronouncement often attributed to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin: One death is a tragedy, millions of deaths are a statistic. Advertisement The pandemic's toll of 1 million dead in such a limited time rivals some of the gravest threats to public health, past and present. It exceeds annual deaths from Aids, which last year killed about 690,000 people worldwide. The virus' toll is approaching the 1.5 million global deaths each year from tuberculosis, which regularly kills more people than any other infectious disease. But "Covid's grip on humanity is incomparably greater than the grip of other causes of death," said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. He noted the unemployment, poverty and despair caused by the pandemic, and deaths from myriad other illnesses that have gone untreated. Cemetery workers place the coffin containing the remains of Jose de Arimateia, 65, who died from Covid-19 complications, into a niche at the municipal cemetery in Nova Iguacu, Brazil. Photo / AP For all its lethality, the virus has claimed far fewer lives than the so-called Spanish flu, which killed an estimated 40 to 50 million worldwide in two years, just over a century ago. That pandemic came before scientists had microscopes powerful enough to identify the enemy or antibiotics that could treat the bacterial pneumonia that killed most of the victims. It also ran a far different course. In the US, for example, the Spanish flu killed about 675,000. But most of those deaths did not come until a second wave hit over the winter of 1918-19. Up to now, the disease has left only a faint footprint on Africa, well shy of early modelling that predicted thousands more deaths. Advertisement But cases have recently surged in countries like Britain, Spain, Russia and Israel. In the United States, the return of students to college campuses has sparked new outbreaks. With approval and distribution of a vaccine still probably months away and winter approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, the toll will continue to climb. "We're only at the beginning of this. We're going to see many more weeks ahead of this pandemic than we've had behind us," Gostin said. - AP

A Delaware judge has rejected a challenge by the state Republican Party to the constitutionality of a new law allowing universal voting by mail in this year's elections. The judge on Monday denied the GOP's request for an injunction to prevent vote-by-mail ballots from being counted in the November election. The judge said the General Assembly's decision to use its emergency powers to declare that voting by mail was necessary to protect public health and ensure the continuity of governmental operations during the coronavirus epidemic was not "clearly erroneous." US Capitol Building in Washington DC. Photo / Brandon Bourdages "Legislation enjoys a presumption of constitutionality," wrote Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III, noting that he was not a legislator, "let alone a super-legislator charged with perfecting the laws of the state." The GOP filed a lawsuit last month arguing that lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled legislature exceeded their constitutional authority in invoking emergency powers to pass the measure. In passing the bill, Democrats asserted that voting by mail is "necessary and proper for insuring the continuity of governmental operations" amid the coronavirus epidemic. They also declared that conforming to the requirements of Delaware's constitution, including its explicit limitations on absentee voting, "would be impracticable." Advertisement At the time lawmakers passed the bill, Delaware was in "phase 2" of its coronavirus economic reopening, with indoor gatherings of up to 250 people allowed, businesses authorised to double occupancy limits, and convention centres and meeting facilities allowed to open. Julia Klein, an attorney representing the GOP, said the law impermissibly expanded the constitutional allowances for casting absentee ballots. She cited a 1972 opinion in which the Delaware Supreme Court said that it was "beyond the power of the legislature, in our opinion, to either limit or enlarge upon the... absentee voter classifications specified in the constitution for general elections." State attorneys, meanwhile, argued that courts are required to give deference to decisions of the General Assembly. They also said that, even though all polling places will be open and there is no prohibition against in-person voting, not allowing universal voting by mail could interfere with the "free and equal" elections guaranteed by the constitution. Glasscock said that the constitutional provision authorising the General Assembly to exercise emergency powers acted as a "safe harbour" allowing it to authorise "general absentee voting," that otherwise would be prohibited under the state constitution. "Amending the Delaware constitution to provide for remote voting in response to an epidemic, before Election Day 2020, would be not only impractical, I note, but impossible," he wrote. The judge noted that the plaintiffs' challenge to the law could not stand unless they were able to demonstrate clearly and convincingly that the legislature's finding that the law is necessary was either false or unwarranted. "On the facts of record, the plaintiffs do not come close to meeting that standard," he wrote. Advertisement The legislature, in the face of an epidemic of airborne disease and in light of the health emergency declared by the Governor, has made a determination that vote-by-mail is necessary for the continued operation of governmental functions, and that it would be impracticable to address this problem other than by otherwise-extraconstitutional means," the judge concluded. "These finding are not clearly erroneous. " - AP