RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by covid-19 in the world, recorded in the last 24 hours 2,087 new deaths from coronavirus and accumulated 434,715 victims since the beginning of the pandemic, but the average number of daily deaths in a week fell this Saturday to its lowest level in two months.
According to the bulletin released on Saturday by the Ministry of Health, 67,009 new infections were also registered in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of cases to 15,586,534 since the beginning of the pandemic, a little more than 15 months ago.
The numbers confirm Brazil as the second country globally in number of victims, behind the United States, and the third in number of cases, only surpassed by the USA and India.
The number of deaths due to coronavirus in Brazil, however, has been falling slowly and gradually after the peak of the second wave of the pandemic, which the country registered in March and April of this year when it reached records of more than 4,000 deaths per day and 100,000 cases per day.
The average number of daily deaths in a week stood this Saturday, May 15, at 1,914, the lowest since March 16 (1,894 deaths per day) and well below the record recorded on April 1 (3,117 deaths per day).
The average number of infections is far from its peak (76,545 cases per day on March 23) but has risen again in recent days after falling to 56,533 on April 26.
The seven-day average number of infections stood at 62,951 per day on Saturday, a number 4.9% higher than one week ago (59,986 cases per day on May 8).
According to the Ministry of Health, of the nearly 15.6 million infected, some 14.1 million, 90.2% of the total, have already recovered and been discharged. At the same time, one million remain under medical care, equivalent to 7.0%.
Data released on Saturday show that Covid-19 has a mortality rate in Brazil of 206.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, a case incidence of 7,417 infections per 100,000 inhabitants, and a fatality rate of 2.8% of those infected.
In an attempt to prevent the situation from worsening with the arrival in the country of a new and apparently more contagious variant of Covid-19, the Brazilian government provisionally banned the entry into the country of foreign passengers from India, which has been recording successive records of deaths and contagions of coronavirus for several days.
The restriction in force as of Saturday is intended to prevent the spread in Brazil of the coronavirus strain identified in India as B.1.617 and classified by the World Health Organization as a global concern.
This variant has spread rapidly in India, a country with about 22 million infected people, where reported deaths have reached about 4,000 per day.