Brazil has overtaken Italy as the country with the third-highest Coronavirus death toll after a daily record of 1,473 fatalities took its total tally to more than 34,000.
The figure published by Brazil’s health ministry on Thursday night showed that only the United States and the United Kingdom have registered more deaths from the disease.
The official number of infections rose to nearly 615,000, the second-largest caseload in the world, behind the US.
Shortly before the numbers were released, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro said in an online broadcast: “We can’t go on like this. Nobody can take it anymore,” Bolsonaro said of the stay-at-home measures, being implemented by state governors and mayors across Brazil even as the number of infections and deaths continues to increase.
“The collateral impact will be far greater than those people who unfortunately lost their lives because of these last three months here,” Bolsonaro said.
