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Brazil’s death toll topped 34,000, overtaking Italy’s to become the third highest in the world, while cases in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and Chile continued to mount.

Impoverished Haiti, with its fragile health system, is also seeing worrying trends as infections and deaths rise in the face of swirling rumours and disinformation about the severity of the disease.

When 25-year-old Jonel Cadet tested positive, he said: “I didn’t believe it, and I even said the president was talking nonsense.”

“It was only by coming here that I really started to believe, because I saw people who were much worse off,” he told AFP from a hospital in Cite Soleil.

OXYGEN SHORTAGES

Since emerging in China late last year, the virus has infected at least 6.6 million people, killed more than 391,000 and wreaked havoc on the global economy by forcing millions to stay inside their homes.

After Brazil reported a new 24-hour record death toll, its fatalities stand behind only the United States, with more than 108,000 deaths, and Britain, with nearly 40,000.

Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has fiercely criticised coronavirus stay-at-home measures, arguing that they are needlessly hurting the economy.

Brazil is the hardest-hit country in Latin America, though Mexico reported a record number of new infections for the second straight day, with 4,442.

And in Peru, desperate residents lined up to buy oxygen tanks for their loved ones, as the government declared oxygen a “strategic health resource” amid an acute shortage.

‘GLOBAL PUBLIC GOOD’

With the pandemic starting to hit the developing world with full force, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said a new vaccine had to be available to everyone across the world.

“A vaccine must be seen as a global public good -- a people’s vaccine, which a growing number of world leaders are calling for,” he said in a message to a virtual summit hosted by Britain.

Governments pledged $8.8 billion at the talks to support Gavi, the global vaccine alliance.