Brazil surpasses 60,000 coronavirus deaths: official

RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) – Brazil topped 60,000 deaths from the novel coronavirus after recording more than 1,000 fatalities over the last 24 hours, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

The South American country has suffered the largest number of daily deaths globally for the last week, and is the second worst affected nation in the world for both cases and fatalities after the United States.

Brazil is showing no signs of reducing either its number of daily cases or deaths.

With more than 46,000 new cases, the country of 212 million now has 1.44 million people infected, although analysts believe the true figure is much higher.

The largest number of deaths have been in the most populous state, Sao Paulo, with 14,700, followed by Rio de Janeiro, with more than 10,000.

Rio s death rate of 584 per million inhabitants is more than twice the national average of 284.

The northeastern state Ceara has been even worse hit with 673 deaths per million, putting it on a par with the hardest hit countries in the world.

Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus has killed at least 512,383 people since the outbreak emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP at 1900 GMT on Wednesday.

At least 10,564,050 cases of coronavirus have been registered in 196 countries and territories. Of these, at least 5,341,000 are now considered recovered.

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections.

Many countries are testing only symptomatic or the most serious cases. The United States is the worst-hit country with 127,681 deaths from 2,658,324 cases. At least 720,631 people have been declared recovered.

After the US, the hardest-hit countries are Brazil with 59,594 deaths from 1,402,041 cases, the United Kingdom with 43,906 deaths from 313,483 cases, Italy with 34,788 deaths from 240,760 cases, and France with 29,861 deaths from 202,126 cases.

The country with the highest number of deaths compared to its population is Belgium with 84 fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by United Kingdom with 65, Spain 61, Italy 58, and Sweden 53.

China — excluding Hong Kong and Macau — has to date declared 83,534 cases (3 new since Tuesday), including 4,634 deaths, and 78,479 recoveries.

Europe overall has 197,605 deaths from 2,693,243 cases, the United States and Canada 136,344 deaths from 2,762,595 infections, Latin America and the Caribbean 116,534 deaths from 2,591,485 cases, Asia 35,156 deaths from 1,330,970 cases, the Middle East 16,470 deaths from 769,591 cases, Africa 10,141 deaths from 406,747 cases, and Oceania 133 deaths from 9,423 cases.

As a result of corrections by national authorities or late publication of data, the figures updated over the past 24 hours may not correspond exactly to the previous day s tallies.