Brazil's government on Saturday stopped publishing a running total of coronavirus deaths and infections in an extraordinary move that critics call an attempt to hide the true toll of the disease in Latin America's largest nation.
The move came after months of criticism from experts that Brazil's statistics are woefully deficient, and in some cases manipulated, so it may never be possible to understand the depth of the pandemic in the country.
Brazil's last official numbers showed it had recorded over 34,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, the third-highest number in the world, just ahead of Italy. It reported nearly 615,000 infections, putting it second, behind the United States. Brazil, with about 210 million people, is the globe's seventh most populous nation.