Since this year began, one third of all people who’ve died in Brazil were victims of Covid-19.
According to data from Brazil’s National Civil Registry,615,329 deaths were reported in the country between January 1 and April 30. Of those,208,370 were related to Covid-19, according to Brazil’s health ministry — 33.9% of the nation’s total. The coronavirus has surged with a vengeance in the South American giant in recent months — fueled in part by a disregard for social distancing precautions and the emergence of extra-contagious new variants — and has claimed more lives in the past four months than in all of 2020. More than 78,000 people in Brazil were killed by the virus last month alone. Meanwhile, despite Brazil’s robust immunization program, its rollout of Covid-19 vaccines has been slow, dogged by supply shortages and delays in the early days of deal-making with global pharmaceutical companies.
