Brazil deaths pass 250,000

BRASILIA: Brazil’s Covid19 death toll has surpassed 250,000, giving the country the world’s secondhighest total fatalities.

Since the pandemic’s start, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has scoffed at the ‘‘little flu’’ and lambasted local leaders for imposing restrictions on activity, saying the economy must keep humming along to prevent worse hardship.

Whereas other countries’ daily cases and deaths have fallen, Latin America’s largest nation is parked on an elevated plateau, a grim repeat of mid2020.

In each of the past five weeks, Brazil has averaged more than 1000 daily deaths. Official data showed a confirmed death toll of 251,498 yesterday .

At least 12 Brazilian states are in a second wave, even worse than the one faced in 2020.

The number of new coronavirus cases in Italy has shown a worryingly significant increase over the past several days, with figures resembling those last recorded in the first half of January.

Authorities yesterday registered nearly 20,000 new cases in 24 hours.

After about four weeks of relative stability, recent weekly figures showed ‘‘a reversal of the trend’’, experts from the independent Gimbe Foundation said. — AAP/DPA

temperatures, potentially allowing it to be kept in pharmacy freezers.

‘‘Alternative temperature for transportation and storage will help ease the burden of procuring ultralow cold storage equipment for vaccination sites and should help to get vaccine to more sites,’’ FDA Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research director Peter Marks said. — Reuters