The confirmed death toll from the novel coronavirus has passed 1 million, according to one respected tracker.
Others are expected to follow suit in the coming hours - a tragic milestone that likely underrepresents the true scale of the pandemic.
Worldometer, which relies on close to real-time official data where possible as well as verified local media reports, says as of 12pm Tuesday (NZ time), 1,005,540 deaths have been linked to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the disease known as COVID-19.
The first reported death was on January 11, meaning an average of more than 3800 people a day have succumbed to the disease.
Worldometer's death toll is usually ahead of others, like the one run by Johns Hopkins University, as it updates in close to real-time, while others tend to update less frequently. Johns Hopkins, which aggregates data from sources including the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and reputable newspapers, has the death toll at 999,667.
This is as close to an official toll the world has - and the WHO says it's likely an underestimate.
"If anything, the numbers currently reported probably represent an underestimate of those individuals who have either contracted COVID-19 or died as a cause of it," Mike Ryan, the WHO's top emergencies expert, said in Geneva on Monday (Europe time).
"When you count anything, you can't count it perfectly but I can assure you that the current numbers are likely an underestimate of the true toll of COVID."
That's because not everyone who succumbs to the disease is known to be infected - particularly in countries with inadequate health systems, or early in the pandemic before testing facilities could be rolled out.
An article in scientific journal Nature on September 1 which looked at excess death rates found far more people were dying than normal in the US, UK and parts of South America, but not all the deaths had been officially recorded as being due to COVID-19.
About 25 percent of excess deaths in the US this year haven't been attributed to COVID-19, for example; while New Zealand, which locked down hard in March and April, this year has had hundreds of fewer deaths than normal, with people likely not dying from things like car crashes and other accidents.
New Zealand has had 25 confirmed deaths from COVID-19 so far, placing us 171st in terms of deaths per capita according to Worldometer and 148th going by Johns Hopkins.
