Brazil surpasses 100,000 deaths, 3 million cases of COVID-19

Brazil has registered more than 3 million cases of the novel coronavirus with over 100,000 deaths, the government reported on Saturday.

The Ministry of Health said that in the last 24 hours, 905 more deaths and 49,970 new cases were reported, bringing the national death toll to 100,477 and the total caseload to 3,012,412.

The state of Sao Paulo, the most populous in the country, has been most affected by the pandemic with 25,016 deaths and 621,731 cases, followed by Rio de Janeiro with 14,070 deaths and 178,524 cases.

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Ricardo Kuchenbecker, a professor of epidemiology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, said the pandemic situation in Brazil remains worrying.

“Although there is a decrease in cases and deaths in the north and northeast, they are still occurring at a very high level,” the epidemiologist said.

“That means that people must not stop taking measures such as wearing a mask, social isolation, not going out if it is not necessary, washing hands constantly … these measures are essential because we will probably have to live with the virus for a long time,” Kuchenbecker told Xinhua.

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The epidemiologist explained that, “in a country with continental dimensions like Brazil, we do not really have a national epidemic curve. We have the sum of the regional epidemic curves, and these are completely different from each other.”

Brazil is one of the countries hit the hardest by the pandemic, second only to the United States, both in terms of the caseload and death toll.

Source: Xinhua