Brazil was leaping toward a grim milestone -- 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 -- on Saturday, and five months after the first reported case, the country had not shown signs of crushing the disease.
The nation of 210 million people has been reporting an average of more than 1,000 daily deaths from the pandemic since late May and had reported 99,572 as of Friday night.
The Health Ministry said there had been a total of 2,962,442 confirmed infections with the new coronavirus -- death and infection tolls second only to the United States. And as in many nations, experts believe that both numbers are severe undercounts due to insufficient testing.