Sao Paulo, Brazil – Nicole Martins expected her mother, who was hospitalized with COVID-19 last month, to end. But when the 24-year-old arrived at the hospital, the look on his father’s face confirmed the most serious fears.
“I thought he was coming out,” Martins told Al Jazeera. “But then I arrived and saw my father crying.”
Hundreds of thousands of Brazilian families have lost their loved ones against COVID-19 since the coronavirus began spreading like wildfire across the country.
On Thursday, the South American nation surpassed 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths, the second largest in the world after the United States. More than half of them were recorded in 2021, while the pandemic has been the deadliest since the pandemic began.