Brazil ‘needs to open new graveyards’ as variants spread

BRAZIL’S Covid outbreak has reached new heights driven by the spread of emerging variants.

Death rates in the country have raged out of control for months. Yet while global caseloads have receded worldwide in recent weeks, Brazil has again found itself setting records and its outbreak is as bad as it has ever been.

Brazil has already identified one variant that has spread alarm across the world and the scale of infection risks spawning further mutations, epidemiologists have warned. Some 8,224 Brazilians died of Covid last week in the

‘If nothing is done, people will be fighting for both hospital beds and graves in the cemetery’

country’s biggest seven-day death toll. Intensive care wards are close to buckling with beds more than 80 per cent full in 18 of the 26 states. Nine of those states are more than 90 per cent full.

Eduardo Pazuello, the health minister, last week admitted that easy-tocatch strains had made controlling the pandemic more difficult.

“The mutated virus has three times more contamination capacity, and the speed can surprise governors in terms of structure and support. This is the reality we have today in Brazil,” he told state governors.

Doctors have called for the immediate imposition of lockdown and distancing rules to try to check the spread.

“In this scenario, if nothing is done, people will be fighting for both hospital beds, and graves in the cemetery,” said Domingos Alves, director of the health intelligence laboratory at the University of São Paulo in Ribeirão Prêto. “We are going to need to open new graveyards.”