BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil has had 8,833 new cases of the novel coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours, and 217 deaths from COVID-19, the health ministry said on Saturday.
The South American country has now registered 22,012,150 cases since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 612,587, according to ministry data, in the world’s third-worst outbreak outside the United States and India and its second-deadliest.
As vaccination advances, the rolling 14-day average of COVID deaths has fallen to 228 a day, the lowest since April 26, 2020, which was one and a half months after the pandemic’s first fatality in Brazil. That compares with a toll of almost 3,000 deaths a day in Brazil at the pandemic’s peak in April of this year.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasilia; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
