Daily Covid Cases: Brazil sets record as 3rd wave breaks
Brazil set a new record for Covid-19 infections with 115,228 new cases identified within 24 hours, the health ministry said on Wednesday, confirming the arrival of a third wave of the pandemic.
During the same period 2,392 new deaths were recorded, bringing the total to 507,109.
Brazil is the second worst-hit in the world in absolute numbers of fatalities, behind the United States which has suffered more than 600,000 deaths.
The largest country in Latin America, with 212 million inhabitants, Brazil has a total of 18,169,881 confirmed Covid cases, according to official figures, which many specialists considered an underestimate.
The number of daily infections has been rising steadily for more than a month and the average death rate has been around 2,000 per day since last week.
"With this continual acceleration in the number of cases, we are already in the third wave," said Carlos Lula, president of the National Council of Health Secretaries (Conass), which brings together health authorities from the countries various states, told the daily O Globo.
The country has been slow to roll out vaccines with only 12% of Brazilians fully immunized, according to the ministry data. Efforts have accelerated recently, with certain states such as Sao Paulo predicting shots for all adults by September.
The government of President Jair Bolsonaro is under scrutiny for delays and alleged misconduct in obtaining vaccines, having failed to respond to early offers from Pfizer last year.
The government instead struck a deal for more a expensive vaccine made by India's Bharat Biotech.
A Senate committee is probing allegations related to Bharat amid a wider investigation of the government's response.
A Brazilian health ministry official told prosecutors he faced internal pressure from an aide to then-health minister Eduardo Pazuello to buy the Bharat shot.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, Bolsonaro's Secretary of the Presidency Onyx Lorenzoni said there had been no influence peddling in the Bharat deal and the vaccines were not overpriced.
The ministry did not respond to request for comment about the allegations.
On Wednesday, the committee also called representatives of Facebook, Google and Twitter to testify before the committee as it weighs possible crimes related to misinformation online about Covid-19.
RUSSIA'S DELTA SPIKE
The pandemic has killed at least 3,893,974 people since the virus first emerged in December 2019, according to an AFP compilation of official data yesterday.
Russia yesterday reported more than 20,000 new infections and 568 deaths, a peak not seen since January, as the country battles a surging outbreak of the Delta variant worsened by a sluggish jab drive.
In total, officials reported 20,182 new cases across the country over the past 24 hours, including just over 8,500 infections in Moscow, the epicentre of Russia's outbreak.
India recorded 54,069 new infections over the past 24 hours, data from the health ministry showed yesterday.
The country also reported the first death due to Delta plus variant of Covid-19 when a 59-year-old woman succumbed to it in Ujjain district of Madhya Pradesh state on Wednesday.
Five persons have so far been found infected with the Delta plus and one of them died, state Medical Education Minister Vishwas Sarang said.
The other four persons, who were vaccinated against Covid-19, are fine, he said adding the person from Ujjain, who died, was not inoculated.
HEART WARNING
The US Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday it plans to move quickly to add a warning about rare cases of heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults to fact sheets for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines.
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory groups, meeting to discuss reported cases of the heart condition after vaccination, found the inflammation in adolescents and young adults is likely linked to the vaccines, but that the benefits of the shots appeared to clearly outweigh the risk.
Health regulators in several countries have been investigating whether the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots using new mRNA technology present a risk and, if so, how serious.
The CDC said that patients with heart inflammation following vaccination generally recover from the symptoms and do well.
In Bhutan, Prime Minister Lotay Tshering yesterday said he "has no problem" in mixing-and-matching Covid-19 vaccine doses to immunize a population of about 700,000 people in the tiny Himalayan nation.
Bhutan, nestled between India and China, has one of the world's lowest Covid-19 fatality counts, with just one person dying from the infectious disease since the pandemic began, reports Reuters.
Tshering - who is also a practicing urologist - said over 90% of the country's eligible population had received a first dose of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine and that the deadline to administer the second dose after a gap of 12 weeks was scheduled to end this month.
"Knowing immunology, knowing how our body reacts to vaccines, I am comfortable to secure a second dose of any vaccine that is, of course, approved by the WHO," he added.
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