Global death toll surpasses 4 million; delta variant dominant strain in the US: Latest COVID-19 updates Edward Segarra, Grace Hauck and Elinor Aspegren, USA TODAY NYC parade honors essential workers as COVID fades Replay Video UP NEXT The global death toll from COVID-19 eclipsed 4 million Wednesday as the crisis increasingly becomes a race between the vaccine and highly contagious variants. 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.