Brazil, for the first time since the health crisis began, has confirmed this Tuesday more than a thousand deaths from coronavirus in a single day, specifically 1,179, representing a total of 17,971 deaths due to the pandemic in a country that in the In recent days it has ranked as the third most affected, second only to the United States and Russia.
According to the latest figures offered by the Johns Hopkins University, Brazil has also registered 17,408 new cases on Tuesday, representing a total of 271,628.
Brazil joins other countries that have already exceeded a thousand deaths in just 24 hours, such as the United States, which registered more than 2,600 in late April; France, China and the United Kingdom.
This Monday, Brazil, which since the beginning of the global health crisis was the most affected place in the South American continent, overtook the United Kingdom as the third with more cases of the new coronavirus, after having done the same days before with respect to Italy, France and Spain. .
Even with the more than a thousand deaths registered this Tuesday, it is still sixth, behind the aforementioned countries, in terms of the number of victims.
Despite these figures, the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has always been opposed to adopting confinement measures, considering that they would excessively damage the country’s economy.
Given the lack of action by the federal government, state and municipal authorities appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided to grant full powers to governors and municipal authorities to define their own measures to contain the advance of the disease.
It is precisely in two of the states most affected by the pandemic, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, where their governors announced last week that they would not abide by the new decree reopening essential services, considering that some of them, such as gyms, hairdressers and beauty centers did not correspond to such a definition.
This measure caught the Minister of Health, Nelson Teich, until a few days ago, who resigned after a month in office after replacing Luiz Henrique Mandetta, a strong defender of quarantine measures and in constant tension with Bolsonaro.
It was notorious that Teich, who did not offer many details about his resignation, did not share Bolsonaro’s thesis about the use of chloroquine to treat COVID-19 patients.
On Tuesday, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have recorded their highest number of deaths in 24 hours. The state of São Paulo has confirmed 324 and has already exceeded 5,000 fatalities, while in the Rio de Janeiro region there have been 227 additional deaths, bringing the total number to more than 3,000.
