RIO DE JANEIRO, June 7. /TASS/: The Johns Hopkins University, which publishes statistics on new type of coronavirus infection and the number of deaths due to infection worldwide, deleted data on Brazil from its website on Saturday.
This happened after the day before Brazilian Health Ministry had stopped to publish relevant summary information. The last time the information on Brazil was published on the university’s website on Thursday. Currently, the data on Brazil is not available and an interactive map offers only statistics for individual states, which, however, are not reflected in the general list.
On Wednesday, the Brazilian Ministry of Health began to publish a daily report with a three-hour delay after the end of the evening news release, and from Friday it changed its structure and began to publish truncated data containing only information for the last 24 hours. The ministry did not publish aggregate growth rates for morbidity and mortality on Friday.
According to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the daily summary should include information on the positive test results revealed on that particular day and deaths recorded during the day. If coronavirus is confirmed in samples of a patient who has died earlier, this fact should be taken into account in the reports on the day of death, and not be included in the latest data, the head of state stated.
Brazil, where the first case of infection with a new coronavirus was confirmed on February 26, ranks second on the list of countries with the highest number of infected (645,771) after the United States (1,901,416). By the number of deaths (35,026), Brazil comes third after the United States (109,215) and the United Kingdom (40,548). Earlier, the Brazilian Health Ministry predicted that the situation would stabilize by July, a gradual slowdown in the spread of infection would start in August, and a decline is expected in September.
