(Bloomberg) — Brazil’s coronavirus death toll has surpassed 200,000 as the respiratory disease sets the Latin American country back and, at best, a national vaccination plan is weeks away. The Ministry of Health has yet to detail the most recent figures on Covid-19 deaths and has shown cases. in the last 24 hours.
As in Europe and the United States, the virus has re-emerged in this vast country in recent weeks. The end-of-year festivities, marked by rallies, and the detection of a new, more contagious variant of the virus in Sao Paulo have added to considerations about the strength of a wave for the moment.
Worse, the country is already lagging behind in the global race for vaccines. While other Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Chile and Mexico, have already begun administering vaccines, Brazil has yet to even approve the use of a vaccine to vaccinate its 210 million people. The Butantan Institute, which produces CoronaVac in partnership with China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd. , is expected to submit an application by Friday.
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The cities of Rio de Janeiro, in Porto Alegre, in the south, and Fortaleza, in the northeast, recorded more cases in December than the first wave of the disease, according to Domingos Alves, a professor of medicine in the Covid component. -19 Brazil Monitoring Group.
Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state that hit the pandemic early, has declared a state of emergency and hospital beds are filling up. Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, will be closed starting next week.
“We have 10 states that are seeing more cases than they were at the beginning of the pandemic, and ICU occupancy rates are reaching alarming levels,” Alves said. “The shift in discussions toward vaccines has lessened the severity of the pandemic. How many more deaths? Will we have until the first Brazilian is vaccinated?
Alves says that if vaccination begins at the end of March, the death toll in Brazil will reach 400,000. The country is expected to reach 8 million cases over the weekend, according to estimates by Rio’s PUC University.