Brazil surpassed four million coronavirus cases on Thursday, as an international panel looking into the global response to the pandemic vowed to uncover how it was able to spread worldwide.
"This is a strong panel poised to ask the hard questions," said former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPR), which will rake over the heavily criticized World Health Organization-led response.
There were almost 44,000 new cases over the previous 24 hours alone, and 834 fatalities.
"In the last two months, we have seen a curve that mixes regions that are increasing, with others that are decreasing," said Paulo Lotufo, professor of epidemiology at the University of Sao Paulo, pointing to spikes in the south and center-west, while cases were falling in the major cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as in the north, AFP reported.
But experts warned the situation could suddenly worsen again if local and regional governments give in to pressure from business groups to reopen the economy too soon, and if social distancing measures are abandoned.
As the death toll rose, the IPPR said its members would have unfettered access to the WHO's files.
The WHO "made it clear that their files are an open book. Anything we want to see, we see," said former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, who co-heads the panel with Sirleaf.
"We can't count on it being another century until a pandemic like this comes around," Clark said. The WHO has been accused of being slow off the mark to react to the initial Covid-19 outbreak in China.
"If another took off like this in short order, how devastating that would be, now that we know the extent of damage that can be done," Clark said.
