Libs blaming Trump from Brazil Rona mess?
RIO DE JANEIRO — Cinthia Ribeiro knew she had a fight on her hands when COVID-19 arrived in her hometown in Brazil. What she didn't know was that, one year on, humans would be out to kill her, too.
Ribeiro is mayor of Palmas, capital of Tocantins, a small state wedged between the southeastern edge of the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado, South America's tropical savanna.
The fresh wave of infections now racing across the landscape has reached her city, flooding hospitals with patients, and pushing intensive care unit occupancy rates up to 96%.
The country is now widely viewed as the epicenter of the pandemic, with the highest number of daily deaths of any nation. On Tuesday, that number topped 3,000 for the first time, with 3,251 deaths recorded.
And this week, Brazil's registered COVID-19 deaths are likely to rise above 300,000 — a toll exceeded only by the United States. Ribeiro bleakly remarks that this number is about the same as the population of her city.
Worried that local health systems would collapse, and there would be many more deaths than the several hundred already logged by Palmas city officials, the mayor tried to buy time.
