Numbers don't lie. On February 24, Brazil reached the 250,000 Covid-19 deaths.
The macabre number was reached at 6:03 pm on Wednesday, just over 24 hours before completing one year of the official record of the first case in the country.
In daily deaths, the country is now experiencing the worst moment of the pandemic. This has been deepened by increased circulation of the coronavirus variants - the most transmissible - already found in 17 states of the country and by a complicated management of immunization, with reports of the lack of vaccine doses by the states.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared on March 11, 2020, two weeks after the country's first recorded case, epidemiological bulletins have shown with numbers the trail of destruction left by the biggest health crisis in the last hundred years.
Behind the numbers are people and their families shattered by the coronavirus, an impact impossible to gauge with precision.
Folha has interviewed many of these families. Reports include suicide attempts, missing bodies, loss of the sole source of income, and the pain of seeing the bodies of relatives buried in mass graves or alone on their deathbeds.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon