COVID kills, but Brazil prez chills
A day after more than 4,000 people in Brazil died of COVID-19, President Jair Bolsonaro continued to downplay the crisis and declared again on Wednesday that lockdowns are off the table.
“We’re not going to accept this politics of stay home and shut everything down,” Bolsonaro said in a speech in the city of Chapeco in Santa Catarina State. “There will be no national lockdown.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, Brazil had nearly 337,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University trackers, second in the world to the U.S., which had nearly 559,000.
Bolsonaro has also denied the benefits of masking up, questioned the efficacy of vaccines and continued to tour the country as if the death toll weren’t spiking at an alarming rate.
Brazil’s Health Ministry reported 4,195 COVID-19 deaths in the 24 hours leading up to Tuesday — the country’s deadliest day of the pandemic — noting that every day since late February has marked a new, grim record. It’s only the third country to surpass that number of daily deaths, along with the U.S. and Peru.