Covid-19 has caused more than one million deaths worldwide since January, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday, urging governments to speed up vaccination as part of the population remains unimmunized. 

"We have passed the tragic milestone of one million deaths due to Covid-19 since the beginning of the year," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference. 

Ghebreyesus called on countries to redouble efforts to vaccinate all health care workers, the elderly, and the most vulnerable people so that 70% vaccination coverage can be achieved worldwide. 

According to the WHO, one-third of the world's population remains unimmunized, including two-thirds of health care workers and three-quarters of the elderly in the poorest countries. 

In January, WHO, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) and their partners set up a mechanism to facilitate the distribution of covid-19 vaccines in 34 countries where vaccination coverage was less than 10%. All but six of the countries were in Africa. 

Thanks to the initiative, only 10 countries still have less than 10% vaccination coverage. 

According to the latest WHO statistics, Covid-19 has caused 6.45 million deaths worldwide since the first cases appeared in late 2019 in China. 

Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and was classified as a pandemic on March 11, 2020.