The World Health Organization's coronavirus dashboard provides a stark illustration of how Covid 19 has affected all of us.

Hundreds of thousands of cases are reported every day with well over half a billion documented so far, no corner of the globe has been left untouched.

Here's a breakdown of where we are now in the pandemic, which provides some clues to what the future might hold.

The first year of the pandemic was about unprecedented changes.

Streets emptied more or less overnight countries all over the world, closed borders and locked down masking up became compulsory.

There were no vaccines and because health care professionals had little experience with the disease catching it was a terrifying proposition.

As the first vaccines were rolled out.

At the end of that first pandemic year, around 90 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide.

Since then, over seven times that number of people have tested positive for the disease and experts estimate there have been many, many more unconfirmed cases at the peak of the omicron variant surge.

Last january, the highest number of cases in the pandemic so far, over 20 million people worldwide were testing positive for the disease every week.

Throughout the pandemic deaths worldwide, unsurprisingly have reflected infection worldwide, A series of waves struck the planet though, different countries suffered differently at different times.

A retrospective reveals at least one detectable pattern.

It was a simple and devastating equation when the number of cases rose and fell in a new wave, the number of deaths followed a couple of weeks later, The deadliest wave so far peaked in early 2021 when in one terrible week, over 100,000 people died worldwide.

But the equation has changed somewhat since the massive omicron wave early this year.

Large numbers of people are still getting sick, but on average fewer are dying.

The changing relationship between case rates and death tolls is at least in part due to another factor, widespread vaccination.

So far over 12.5 billion doses of vaccines have gone into arms all over the world.

Significant percentages of populations in the Americas, europe and Asia are now fully vaccinated though there's still a lot to do in africa the biggest vaccination drive in history has not all on its own been enough to stop the continued spread of covid 19 but coupled with the immunity induced and many people through wide scale exposure experts say it's brought the day when we declare the pandemic at an end a lot nearer and save tens of millions of lives.

Well for more, let's speak to Nina Schwalbe, she's vaccination and immunization expert and a principal fellow uh dealing at the United Nations International Institute for Global Health.

She's attending the world Health Summit that's taking place in Berlin right now.

Thanks for being with us.

It's been almost three years now since we learned about the first covid case.

Where do things stand now are we?

How close are we to seeing an end to this pandemic.

Thanks for the question.

And thanks for having me here.

Unfortunately, until everybody's vaccinated, we really won't be able to call an end to this pandemic.

Uh we still have people dying.

We have thousands of people dying around the world each day.

And uh and and the best way to protect ourselves is really to get vaccinated which prevents us from getting ill and and and from death.

So we've still got a long way to go.

We the pandemic has brought to light vast inequalities with respect to uh vaccine distribution according to the World Health Organization, vaccination rates and low-income countries standard 19% compared to almost 75% in high income countries.

How can this gap be overcome?

Yeah, I think we have to think about it right from the start and when we have new vaccines available, we have to essentially reserve some for low income countries.

It can't be a pay to play market on vaccines and vaccination.

And although there was a global effort through covax facility, global effort.

World Health Organization Gabby and others to try to to try to correct for that inequality the rich countries really really got in line first and a lot of the manufacturing of vaccines is still based in in higher income countries, which meant that unfortunately again, the higher income countries came in line first.

So less than a quarter of people in low income countries have been vaccinated Now.

You're an immunization expert and you've been focusing uh one of the things I've been focusing on is gender inequality in this whole Matrix has covid affected women differently than men.

Unfortunately.

Or fortunately women are primarily caregivers.

They're the primary caregivers.

They comprise a lot of the primary health care workforce and women have experienced a double triple quadruple burden from this disease.

They're taking care of their parents, they're taking care of their Children, they're going to work and a lot of women have lost their jobs as a result or had to leave the workforce.

So the the extreme burden on women during the pandemic has has made them really disproportionately affected over men Besides and beyond the epidemiology.

Also in terms of access to vaccine coverage, Women have burden at home.

They often work in the informal settings.

Many of us who work in jobs, vaccines were offered at our workplace, But for women in the informal care setting or in the informal care societies, they didn't have access to vaccines in the same way that men did.

What would you say are the key lessons that we've learned from this pandemic and do they make us better prepared for the next one?

Well, we can hope so.

And there's a conference happening right now in Berlin with over 4000 experts, talking exactly what we need to do.

There's going to be a high level meeting at the United Nations next year talking about how we can be better prepared.

Um We are we do a lot of work at the U.

N.

U.

University on Gender and we think including women's voices, community voices just from the start is one way we can be better prepared.

Um putting more women in leadership levels to think about how to respond to the pandemic and also making sure and putting in place uh waivers for intellectual property, vaccine, manufacturing facilities in low income countries.

There are hundreds of lessons learned and we just need to act on them.

Nina Schwalbe, principal fellow at the United Nations International Institute for Global Health.

Thanks for being with us today.

Thank you so much.