More than 100 countries will have to slash spending on vital services - such as health and education - because the pandemic has pushed them into even deeper debt, a new study has warned, report agencies.
The report - by US researchers - says the world is underestimating the danger.
The study says Covid-19 has turned an existing debt problem into a full blown crisis. Low-income countries have to find a way to pay their creditors, so they cut back hard on their public spending.
The study- by Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a group of UN member states, international organisations, members of civil society and the private sector which describes itself as working towards sustainable development goals - warns that unsustainable levels of debt will widen global inequalities.
It gives the example of Zambia - where the government now has to allocate almost half its annual revenue to service debts - leaving very little to spend on its people.
Researchers also say the International Monetary Fund has grossly underestimated the scale of the threat from debt distress.
Meanwhile, the overall number of global Covid cases has now surged past 231 million, an alarming figure that paints a bleak picture of the pandemic.
The total case count mounted to 231,087,421 while the death tally from the virus reached 4,735,968 on Thursday evening, according to Worldometers tally
More than 6.03 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. The latest rate was roughly 31.5 million doses a day.
The US has recorded 42,543,373 cases to date and more than 681,175 people have died so far from the virus in the country, as per the university data.
Brazil, which has been experiencing new wave of cases since January, registered 21,283,567 cases. Brazil's Covid-19 death toll has also risen to 592,316.
India's Covid-19 tally rose to 33,531,498 on Wednesday, as 26,964 new cases were registered in 24 hours across the country, as per the federal health ministry's data. Besides, as many as 383 deaths due to the pandemic since Tuesday morning took the total death toll to 445,768.
Another report adds: The pace of vaccinations in Africa must rise by over seven times to around 150 million per month on average to meet the global goal of vaccinating 70% of every country's population, the World Health Organization (WHO) Africa has said.
"As it stands one in three people globally are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, but in Africa this drops to one in 25," Dr Benido Impouma of WHO Africa said at a news briefing.
Covax deliveries were still coming in to African countries - with four million doses arriving in the past week - but it was concerning that only a third of the doses pledged by the end of 2021 had been received, he added.
He was talking after a virtual summit aimed at boosting global vaccination rates against Covid, where US President Joe Biden pledged to donate 500 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine to developing nations from next year.
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