Brazil Sees Record COVID Deaths, Hospitals Swamped

The Guardian reports:

At the end of last year Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro – a Donald Trump-worshiping populist who has gleefully sabotaged Covid containment efforts – declared his country had reached “the tail end” of what was already one of the world’s worst outbreaks.

Bolsonaro was wrong. Three months later Latin America’s largest nation has lost almost 100,000 more lives – taking its total death toll to more than 275,000, second only to the US – and been plunged into the deadliest chapter of its 13-month epidemic.

This week, as a record 2,349 daily deaths were reported, the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva castigated Bolsonaro’s “moronic” handling of the crisis and urged citizens to confront their incompetent “blowhard” leader.

Read the full article.

I spent the last few days talking to frontline Brazilian doctors, from Porto Alegre to Recife. The situation they describe is devastating & getting worse by the day. In the time it took me to research the article more than 10,000 Brazilians have died. https://t.co/gSC2aF2Cyl

— Tom Phillips (@tomphillipsin) March 13, 2021