Witnesses claim that after an ambulance tried to resuscitate the man, the team left the corpse to rot on the sidewalk. Relatives and neighbors suspect that Valnir Mendes da Silva died undiagnosed. It was thought that the coronavirus might have led him to die of a cardiac arrest.

Removal of corpses not their responsibility, says ambulance team

According to the man's stepson, Marcos Vinicius Andrade da Silva, the ambulance arrived on Saturday, but did not bring the body. The death certificate said that paramedics declared the cause of death was cardiac arrest and one more unknown cause.

They added they were not responsible for handling the removal of the corpse. They did not test Silva's body for COVID0-19.

Marcos said he tried to find local officials who would bury his stepfather's body. He called police officers on patrol that day, and they alerted colleagues at the police station, but they appeared to have refused.

While countries like Vietnam, Switzerland, and South Korea are well on their way to recovering their economy following success on slowing down the transmission, Brazil, among other Latin American countries, seems to be approaching its peak of the curve.

Last week Brazil surpassed Great Britain in the number of positive coronavirus cases. With over 17,000 people dead, the country comes third after Russia and the United States.

The healthcare crisis led to overwhelmed capacities in intensive care units and shortages in emergency services in Rio state especially.

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Coronavirus cases likely three times as more than reported

Apparently, data of coronavirus deaths in Brazil suggest that more young people are dying of COVID-19 than the elderly. With over 200 million in the population, South America's largest country reported over 310,000 positive cases of coronavirus. The death toll was at 20,000 this Thursday.

Medical researchers estimate that the country has over 3 million infected people. Due to the lack of testing and compliance to presidential orders against social distancing and home isolation, people might be sicker than they realize.

It was approximated that the age groups who most likely contracted the disease are 20 - 29 and 30 - 39, with almost 600,000 from each group, which was twice as many as the figure for those aged 60 - 69.

National School of Public Health doctor Patricia Canto said that the statistics were a big concern, since young people appeared to not be following mitigation measures. Staying at home in Brazil was difficult to do, especially since 20% of the population lived with less than $6 a day.

The employee population in the impoverished communities most often worked in the informal sector, where jobs like cleaning, cooking, and childcare required them to leave the house.

University of Brasilia epidemiologist Mauro Sanchez acknowledged that Brazil had a younger population, and so it was natural for the number of cases to be higher among people aged below 60 years old. He did say that it was also because young adults were staying home less.

Sanchez added that young Brazilians were more exposed to the coronavirus because they did not have a choice.