Brazil’s coronavirus deaths surge, mass graves are dug and president says ‘so what’?
- As virus cases surge, Brazil starts to worry its neighbours
- Amazon city running out of coffins, digs mass graves
Brazil’s virtually uncontrolled surge of Covid-19 cases is spawning fear that construction workers, truck drivers and tourists from Latin America’s biggest nation will spread the disease to neighbouring countries that are doing a better job of controlling the coronavirus.
Brazil, a continent-sized country that shares borders with nearly every other nation in South America, has reported more than 70,000 cases and more than 5,000 deaths, according to government figures and a tally by Johns Hopkins University – far more than any of its neighbours. The true number of deaths and infections is believed to be much higher because of limited testing.
The country’s borders remain open, there are virtually no quarantines or curfews and President Jair Bolsonaro continues to scoff at the seriousness of the disease.
The country of 211 million people surpassed China – where the virus began – in the official number of Covid-19 deaths this week, prompting Bolsonaro to say: “So what?”
“I am sorry,’’ the far-right president told journalists. “What do you want me to do?”
Deaths from the coronavirus outbreak have piled up so fast in the Amazon rainforest’s biggest city that the main cemetery is burying five coffins at a time in collective graves.
