Brazil, which has been more affected than any other U.S. country in the pandemic, has recorded 69,074 new cases and 1,595 new deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to more than 2.5 million infections and 90134 people killed from the start. pandemic, the Ministry of Health said.
Technical disorders probably contributed to higher numbers.
The Ministry of Fitness said Tuesday that with its online notification formula it had delayed figures in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest state and the one with the highest number of instances and deaths.
But in recent weeks, the number of cases and deaths in the country of another 212 million people has been stubbornly high, even on general days.
An official at the Ministry of Health attributed this to an increase in evidence.
“The testing program in Brazil has grown a lot in recent weeks. This is an incredible point,” Arnaldo Medeiros, secretary of fitness surveillance, said at a press conference.
Open to travellers
The government extended coronavirus bans on foreign travelers arriving by land or sea for another 30 days, but said the restrictions “will no longer allow access for foreigners arriving by air.”
Brazil closed its air borders to non-residents on 30 March, at a time when the virus ravaged Europe and Asia and only moved to South America.
Now Brazil is the hotspot, without signals, its curve is about to decrease.
The tourism industry has already lost almost 122 billion reais ($23.6 billion) as a result of the pandemic, according to the National Confederation of Trade in Goods, Services and Tourism (CNC).
Overall, Latin America’s largest economy faces a record contraction of 9.1% this year, for the International Monetary Fund.
Leave the lock too soon?
It remains to be noted how many foreigners will come.
Brazil has recorded more than 1,000 day-consistent deaths since early July and more than 30,000 new cases consistent with the day since mid-June.
President Jair Bolsonaro has struggled to engage the epidemic and faces complaints about its handling of the crisis.
The far-right leader dismissed the virus as a “small flu” and attacked the blocking measures taken by the state and local government to involve it, arguing that the economic consequences may be worse than the disease.
Even after contracting the virus himself before this month, which forced him to quarantine the presidential palace for more than two weeks, Bolsonaro continued to minimize the severity of the pandemic.
Instead of padlocks, Bolsonaro advocates hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, to fight the virus.
Like American Donald Trump, whom he admires, Bolsonaro touts the drug as a cure for the virus, despite a number of clinical studies concluding that it has no opposite effect to COVID-19 and can cause serious side effects.
After testing positive for the virus, the Brazilian leader himself took hydroxychloroquine, which appeared in his tablet box.
Bolsonaro is recently its third Minister of Pandemic Health, an active duty army general with no prior medical experience.
The two predecessors of the acting minister, be it doctors, left after clashing with Bolsonaro, adding his insistence that the Ministry of Hydroxychloroquine Health opposed COVID-19.