Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll overtook Britain’s on Friday to become the second highest in the world with 41,828 dead, but the World Health Organisation said the nation’s health system was standing up to the pressure.

“The system as such from the data we see is not overwhelmed,” the WHO’s top emergencies expert Dr. Mike Ryan said, with few areas of Brazil using more than 80 per cent of their hospitals’ intensive care bed capacity. Brazil clearly has hotspots in heavily-populated cities, he said, but overall its health system is coping with the world’s second worst number of infections.

The ministry of health reported on Friday a cumulative total of 828,810 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with 25,982 new infections in the last 24 hours, and another 909 deaths, numbers second only to the US. “The data we have at the moment supports (the vision of) a system under pressure but a system still coping with the number of severe cases,” Ryan said at a briefing in Geneva.