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The World Health Organization voiced alarm on Monday over a rapidly worsening Covid-19 situations in Brazil and Mexico, urging them to be “very serious” in stopping the spread.
Both countries had seen both cases and deaths from the rise of the new coronavirus in recent weeks when a second wave of the pandemic struck.
“I think Brazil has to be very, very serious,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters, warning that the situation was “very, very worrying.”
And he echoed the same concern when asked about Mexico, saying that country was “in bad shape.”
“The number of cases doubled and the number of deaths doubled … we would like to ask Mexico to be very serious.”
Brazil has been one of the countries most affected by the pandemic, with more than 172,000 deaths, the second highest number in the world, after the United States.
After a seemingly endless plateau, with more than 1,000 deaths a day from June to August, on a seven-day moving average, the numbers had finally been falling in the giant nation of 212 million people.
But Tedros noted that while the first week of November had seen 2,538 deaths, the death toll in Brazil last week was 3,876, “a significant increase.”
The number of cases also effectively doubled during the same period, and Brazil faced 218,000 cases last week alone.
President Jair Bolsonaro, who has downplayed the pandemic from the start, has also dismissed talks about a second wave as “gossip.”
The 65-year-old far-right leader, who has also had Covid-19, argues that the economic impact of the lockdown measures is worse than the virus itself, and has also said that he will not take a vaccine when one is available.
Meanwhile, Mexico saw its total death toll surpass 100,000 on November 20 and has added more than 5,000 deaths since then.
Over the weekend, for the first time, he counted more than 12,000 cases in a single day.
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