RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil registered in the last 24 hours, 4,195 deaths associated with Covid-19, a new daily high, and accumulates 336,947 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic a little more than a year ago, official sources reported on Tuesday.
The Ministry of Health reported 86,979 new coronavirus infections, bringing the total number of infected to 13,100,580.
Brazil is currently the country with the highest number of daily deaths from Covid-19 on the planet, with a roling average of over 2,500 deaths per day in the last week.
The previous highest daily number of deaths from covid-19 in the country was on March 31, when it reached 3,869.
São Paulo, the richest and most developed state in Brazil, with a population of 46 million, similar to that of entire countries such as Argentina or Spain, registered a new daily record of 1,389 deaths in the last 24 hours.
Almost 90% of the intensive care units in the São Paulo region are occupied. In the capital city of São Paulo, given the increase in the number of deaths, the local authorities have been forced to authorize night burials and hire school buses to transport the corpses.
The situation is practically the same in the other 26 states of the country, where the public hospital network is at the limit of its capacity and is also struggling with the lack of essential drugs for the most serious patients’ intubations.
Also, there is concern about the circulation of variants of the coronavirus considered more infectious, such as the one that emerged in the state of Amazonas (north), known as P.1, and already predominant in several states, such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
Cases of this new strain, which according to the Ministry of Health is “up to three times” more contagious, have been detected in 21 of the 27 Brazilian states, and the British variant in 13 of them, according to data from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a medical research center of reference in Latin America.
Fiocruz warned on Tuesday in its latest bulletin that the pandemic “may remain at critical levels throughout April”, which would put even more pressure on the almost collapsed public health system.
“The analysis shows that the SARS-CoV-2 and its variants continue to circulate intensively throughout the country,” the institution indicated.
Source: efe