The COVID-19 death toll soared an all time high in Brazil with 3,000 people who succumbed to the infectious disease on Tuesday. The country has been struggling to contain the surge of cases that has propelled the its healthcare on the verge of collapse.

The health ministry recorded 3,251 deaths in the past 24 hours taking the overall death to nearly 299,000. The country is second to only United States in terms of COVID-19 deaths.

The latest death milestone has come on the same day when President Jair Bolsonaro got a fourth health minister of the pandemic in his cabinet. The Brazilian government has been facing flak after it downplayed the virus and didn’t go according to expert advice to on containing it.

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Brazil’s average daily COVID-19 deaths have tripled since the start of the year to 2,364. It currently has the highest death ratio in the world. The first two health ministers of pandemic, Luiz Henrique Mandetta and Nelson Teich, both fell out over the defiance of expert advice on containing the virus.

President Bolsonaro said that the country would resume “very soon a normal life.” He added that, “I want to reassure the Brazilian people and inform them that the vaccines are guaranteed. By the end of the year we will have more than 500 million doses of vaccine to vaccinate the whole population.”

On the vaccination front, the country has vaccinated around 11.1 million Brazilians, which is 5.2% of the population have received at least one dose of vaccine and 3.5 million have received both the shots, according to AFP. 

According to the experts, the outbreak was caused by a local variant of the virus and is believed to be more contagious than the original one. The health ministry said that medical oxygen supplies were at ‘worrying’ levels.

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In the capital city Brasilia, more than 400 people are currently in line for the intensive care unit beds. Videos and images of bodies piled in corridors waiting to get shifted to morgues are doing the rounds on media.

Six states with critical condition in terms of oxygen supplies are Acre and Rondonia, Mato Grosso, Amapa, Ceara and Rio Grande do Norte. The country has registered 12.1 million COVID-19 cases, ranking at number two after the United States.