Brazil approaches 700,000 deaths from Covid-19

Brazil has accumulated 699,634 deaths and more than 37 million cases of Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. The data is from the National Council of Health Secretaries (Conass), released this Tuesday (14).

As of March of this year, the dissemination of pandemic indicators, which used to be daily, became weekly. In epidemiological week No. 10 of 2023, between March 5th and 11th, 328 deaths and 60,450 cases of the disease were recorded in the country.

“In view of the significant reduction in the number of serious cases and deaths, with the advancement of vaccination, several managers started to disclose the data only on working days. As the data reported refer to the date of its disclosure, from the conclusion of the investigation process, the daily disclosure may eventually lead to misunderstandings in its interpretation”, said Nereu Henrique Mansano, technical advisor at Conass, in a statement.

The indicators show a slight drop compared to the previous week, when 360 deaths and 61,559 infections from the coronavirus were recorded.

Reinforcement in vaccination

Since February, when the National Movement for Vaccination began, around 2 million doses of bivalent vaccines against Covid-19 have been administered to the priority population. According to the Ministry of Health, the series of actions aims to increase vaccination coverage against various diseases, especially that caused by the coronavirus.

Bivalent vaccines protect against the original virus, the Omicron variant, and its subvariants. At this first moment, the immunizer has been applied to people at greater risk of developing severe forms of the disease: elderly people over 70 years old, immunocompromised people, employees and people living in permanent institutions, indigenous people, riverside people and quilombolas.