“The president is looking to the elections in 2022. Henrique Aguiar, a Brazilian living in Ireland, said that Bolsonaro’s Covid-skepticism and reluctance to lockdown the country is a dangerous political strategy to consolidate his voter base and drum up support ahead of next year’s election. President Bolsonaro has continued to ignore calls for a lockdown, telling his citizens to “stop whining” about the virus last month. The highly contagious P1 variant is rampant throughout the country and concerns have been raised internationally that Brazil is now a breeding ground for new variants. The World Health Organisation said hospitals are in a critical condition with many intensive care units almost full. Hospitals are so overwhelmed that some doctors now have to choose who to treat and who to let die.īrazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's handling of the pandemic has been widely criticised both in Brazil and internationally. When bottlenecks emerged, it was too late to get large quantities in time. Taking cues from President Jair Bolsonaro, who has likened the virus to little more than a flu, his health ministry for months bet big on a single vaccine, ignoring other producers. The slow vaccine rollout has crushed Brazilians' pride in their own history of carrying out huge immunisation campaigns that were the envy of the developing world. Picture: AP Photo/Andre PennerĪ more contagious variant of the virus has been rampaging across the country.Īs cases surge, hospitals are running out of critical sedatives.Īs a result, there have been reports of some doctors diluting what supplies remain and even tying patients to their beds while breathing tubes are pushed down their throats. More than 370,000 people have been killed by the virus across Brazil’s 26 states with thousands more dying every day.Ĭemetery workers wearing protective gear lower the coffin of a person who died from complications related to Covid-19 into a gravesite at the Vila Formosa cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Brazil, where deaths are running at about 3,000 per day, accounting for one-quarter of the lives lost worldwide in recent weeks, the crisis has been likened to a "raging inferno". Today, they are underway in more than 190 countries, though progress in bringing the virus under control varies widely. When the world back in January passed the bleak threshold of two million deaths, immunisation drives had just started in Europe and the United States.
The global death toll from coronavirus has now topped a staggering three million people amid repeated setbacks in the worldwide vaccination campaign.