Brazil exceeds 400,000 deaths from covid-19

The James family says goodbye to Frank, his father, after he died of covid-19 in the Campo da Esperanca cemetery, in Brasilia.UESLEI MARCELINO / Reuters

Brazil has exceeded 400,000 deaths from covid-19.

The country, mired in a serious health situation and slow vaccination, registered its first death from coronavirus on March 12, 2020. After 14 months, the health authorities accounted for 401,186, as reported this Thursday.

Deaths from covid in Brazil represent 13% of those registered worldwide.

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The management of Jair Bolsonaro at the head of the pandemic has led Brazil to be the second country with the most deaths from covid-19, only behind the United States with about 570,000 deaths, according to data from the World Organization of the Health (WHO).

Just this Thursday, the Brazilian Ministry of Health added about 70,000 new infections and 3,000 new deaths.

The start of 2021 has been a hard blow for Brazil.

From January to April, the country has registered 14.6 million cases of contagion, double that of 2020: 7.7 million, according to the

agency

.

Bolsonaro began by trivializing the epidemic as "a little flu." The Brazilian president even declared that "you had to die of something" and, to his compatriots scared by the death records, he blurted out a month ago: "Stop complaining and whining." Only public complaints from the economic class convinced him of the need to promote vaccination. And it was those same demands that created the environment for the Supreme Court to order the Senate to open a commission of inquiry.

A study coordinated by the European Center for Disease Control (ECDC) has concluded that the infections caused by the three variants of the covid that have most concerned the authorities in recent months - the British, the South African and the Brazilian - cause more serious clinical pictures than the others that circulate on the continent.

The Brazilian multiplies the risk of requiring hospitalization by 2.6 and 2.2 of entering an Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

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