The Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro has recorded more deaths than births for the sixth straight month as the country struggles to control the coronavirus outbreak.
The municipal government reported 36,437 deaths and 32,060 births in March, according to data.
In the same month, at least 10 other Brazilian cities with more than 500,000 residents recorded more deaths than births, according to CNN.
The proportion of those deaths resulting from COVID-19 infection is not immediately clear, but the figures come from the fact that Brazil recorded the world’s second-highest number of coronavirus deaths after the United States.
As of Tuesday, more than 358,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in Brazil, according to a New York Times tracking tool.
President Jair Bolsonaro has largely ignored the effect of the virus and his government has tried to hide information about the true scale of the crisis.
On April 6, Brazil recorded more than 4,000 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours for the first time.
Intensive care teams are operating at more than 90 percent capacity in the highest of Brazilian states, the Associated Press reported Sunday, presenting local data. Seven out of 10 hospitals are on the verge of running out of oxygen and anesthetics, the AP said.
At the start of the pandemic, the country dug mass graves for those killed by the coronavirus, with corpses photographed in the streets.
Bolsonaro has long refused to impose a nationwide lockdown and in the past had said the virus was a “little flu” that other people “stop complaining about. “
Bolsonaro has defended his approach and last week denied being “genocidal” in his reaction to the coronavirus.
“They called me a homophobe, racist, fascist, executioner and now. . . What happens now?Now I’m. . . who kills a lot of people? Genocidal. Now I am genocidal,” he said.
Even with vaccine stockpiles already ordered, Brazil has been slow to administer vaccines to its 211 million citizens.
As of Wednesday morning, 32 million vaccines had been administered, according to a tracker by G1 Globo.
Bolsonaro also questioned the efficacy of the vaccines, saying in December that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine could simply “turn other people into crocodiles. “
Brazil had planned to vaccinate its population with doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, but ordered relief materials from the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine, made through Sinovac Biotech, in an attempt to avoid production delays.
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