Worldwide COVID-19 cases yesterday passed 150 million, as India recorded another 385,000 new cases in the past 24 hours and Brazil’s death toll surpassed 400,000.
According to official data, 150.3 million COVID-19 cases have been declared since the virus was first discovered in China in December 2019.
The number of new daily infections has more than doubled since mid-February. The figure had slowed to a more than 350,000 a day in January, but is now 821,000 a day.
Photo: AFP
In India, 2.5 million cases have been detected over the past seven days, a daily average of 357,000.
The rise in infections has been blamed in part on a new variant, but also on failure to follow virus restrictions, the WHO said on Thursday.
India recorded 385,000 new cases in the past 24 hours — a new global record — and almost 3,500 deaths, according to official data that many experts suspect falls short of the true toll.
More than 200,000 have died from the virus in India, more than 45,000 of them last month, although many other nations have suffered far worse death rates on a per capita basis.
Brazil, with a population around a sixth of India, has recorded 401,186 deaths as of Thursday.
The country has struggled to secure enough vaccines as the Senate investigates whether Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has exacerbated the crisis.
The Brazilian Ministry of Health reported 3,001 COVID-19 deaths in the past 24 hours.
The country is also struggling with vaccine shortages. About 28 million people have received a first COVID-19 vaccine does, which is just more than 13 percent of the population, while about 12.7 million have received a second.
On Tuesday, the Senate opened an investigation into whether there was criminal neglect in the Bolsonaro administration’s handling of the pandemic.
The president has downplayed the virus, fought stay-at-home measures to contain it and rejected offers of various vaccines — including, initially, Pfizer’s.
“I was wrong about nothing,” he told supporters in defending his handling of the pandemic as the commission opened.
Bolsanoro said that the economic damage of measures such as a national lockdown would have caused more suffering than the virus itself.
Brazilian Senator Renan Calheiros, the commission’s rapporteur, vowed to hold officials accountable for mishandling the crisis.
The senators are to investigate, among other things, horrific scenes such as those that unfolded earlier this year in Manaus, where dozens of COVID-19 patients suffocated to death due to oxygen shortages.
“The country has the right to know who contributed to these thousands of deaths, and they must be punished immediately,” Calheiros said.
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