Brazil takes down COVID-19 data, hiding soaring death toll
Brazil removed months of data on its COVID-19 epidemic from public view on Saturday, as President Jair Bolsonaro defended delays and changes to official record-keeping of the world's second-largest outbreak.
Brazil's Health Ministry removed the data from a website that had documented the epidemic over time and by state and municipality. The ministry also stopped giving a total count of confirmed cases, which have shot past 672,000 — more than anywhere outside the U.S. — or a total death toll, which passed Italy this week, nearing 36,000 by Saturday.
"The cumulative data... does not reflect the moment the country is in," Bolsonaro said on Twitter, citing a note from the ministry. "Other actions are underway to improve the reporting of cases and confirmation of diagnoses."
Bolsonaro has played down the dangers of the pandemic, replaced medical experts in the Health Ministry with military officials and argued against state lockdowns to fight the virus.
Neither Bolsonaro nor the ministry gave a reason for erasing most of the data on the government website, which had been a key public resource for tracking the pandemic. The page was taken down on Friday and reloaded Saturday with a new layout and just a fraction of the data, reflecting only deaths, cases and recoveries within the last 24 hours.
View this graphic on nbcnews.comStudy: Black Americans most interested in COVID-19 news
NEW YORK — Black Americans, who have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus, have shown a more intense interest in news about the pandemic compared to whites. Those were the consistent findings in a Pew Research Center survey taken in late April when COVID-19 was dominating the news.
For example, 26 precent of blacks reported discussing the virus “almost all the time” with others, compared to 10 percent of whites who say that. Forty-eight percent of blacks told Pew they were closely following news about the local availability of coronavirus tests, compared to 25 percent of whites.
Similarly, almost half of black people questioned (47 percent) said they were following stories about local hospitals closely, while a quarter of whites (24 percent) said the same thing. Roughly half of blacks had an intense interest in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, with 34 percent of whites saying the same.
The margin of error in Pew's American News Pathways Project is plus or minus 1.5 percent.
U.S. coronavirus deaths surpass 110,000
As people took to the streets Saturday to decry the death of George Floyd the number of coronavirus deaths in the United States surpassed 110,000, according to NBC News' accounting of virus data.
The nation has seen 1,916,237 cases and 110,041 deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the data. One month ago President Donald Trump, who has revised his estimation of the pandemic's death toll upward multiple times, said he believed it could reach 100,000 when all was said and done.
Johns Hopkins University of Medicine counts 6,804,044 cases worldwide and 362,678 deaths, with the United States leading in raw numbers for both categories.
On Saturday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has been hardest hit by the virus, said Friday's COVID-19 death toll of 35 marked a "record low" since the pandemic struck.
View this graphic on nbcnews.comNorth Carolina sets record for new cases for third straight day
North Carolina reported 1,370 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday — the third straight day the state has set a record for new cases.
State officials reported 1,189 new cases on Thursday and 1,289 on Friday.
The numbers bring the state's total coronavirus cases to 34,625, with 992 deaths, including 26 new deaths reported Saturday.
The spike comes more than two weeks after North Carolina lifted its stay-at-home rules, allowing for limited social gatherings and letting restaurants reopen to customers with reduced capacity.