Brazil in 3rd spot in cases; global tally nears 5mn
SAO PAULO: Brazil has the thirdhighest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, according to figures released by John Hopkins University on Monday, a troubling surge for a country struggling to respond to the pandemic.
The coronavirus has infected nearly 5 million people globally, claiming at least 322,000 lives.
With 254,220 confirmed cases, Brazil has now surpassed Britain, Spain and Italy in the past 72 hours on the list of total infections, and is behind only the US and Russia. Brazil has registered 16,792 Covid-19 deaths, the sixthhighest toll in the world. But experts say the real figures could be 15 times higher or more.
President Jair Bolsonaro is urging the country to get back to work to stop an economic crash. State and local authorities, however, are largely calling on citizens to stay home and practice social distancing .
The virus is spreading so fast among the indigenous people in the furthest parts of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest that doctors are now evacuating critical Covid-19 patients by plane to the only intensive care units in the vast region. “The number of Covid-19 patients has increased a lot,” said Edson Santos Rodrigues, a pediatric doctor working on medevac planes for the state of Amazonas.
Three-quarters of the 540 confirmed cases among 40 tribes are in the Amazon where the pandemic has hit Manaus so badly that it was the first Brazilian city to run out of ICU beds.