Brazil adrift as virus toll approaches 100,000

SAO PAULO (AFP) – Five months after confirming its first case of the new coronavirus, Brazil is fast approaching the bleak milestone of 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, a tragedy experts blame on the country’s lack of coherent response.

It will be just the second country to cross that grim threshold, after the United States, where the death toll is now over 150,000.

“It’s a tragedy, one of the worst Brazil has ever seen,” said sociologist Celso Rocha de Barros, as the number of infections in the sprawling South American country approached three million – also the second-highest in the world, after the US.

Brazil confirmed its first case of the new coronavirus on Feb. 26: a Sao Paulo businessman returning from a trip to Italy.

The country of 212 million people registered its first death on March 16.

“At that point, Brazil was more or less getting organized to deal with the pandemic,” said Paulo Lotufo, an epidemiologist at the University of Sao Paulo.