⁍ Brazil set daily records on Wednesday for new COVID-19 cases and related fatalities.

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⁍ The 69,074 new confirmed cases pushed the country past 2.5 million infections and 90,000 killed.

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⁍ Last week, Brazil recorded 7,677 deaths from COVID-19, the most fatalities in any week since the pandemic began.

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– The death toll from Brazil’s coronavirus—the world’s second-worst outbreak of the disease—reached 90,000 on Wednesday, with 69,074 new cases and 1,595 additional deaths reported by the country’s Health Ministry, Reuters reports. That brings the country’s total infections to 2.5 million and the death toll to 90,000, making it the world’s second-worst outbreak of the disease after the one in the US. The outbreak is spreading, with health officials worried about new hot spots in the country. Sao Paulo, Brazil’s most populous and hardest-hit state, has seen more than 26,000 cases on Wednesday alone. While Sao Paulo and neighboring Rio de Janeiro were hit first by the virus, health officials have expressed rising concern over outbreaks in the center-west and far south of the country, where the arrival of winter favors contagion. “We present national data but it’s like we have (multiple) COVID-19 pandemics with different regions of the country behaving differently,” health vigilance secretary Arnaldo Correia de Medeiros said in a televised press briefing. A Brazilian research institute on Wednesday said it had reached an agreement with China’s Sinopharm to start what would be the fourth major trial of a potential vaccine in the country. President Jair Bolsonaro has fought against restrictions on economic activity, and the disease has advanced as governors and mayors have yielded to the pressure. In some cases, Brazilians have packed into bars and crowded public squares without masks, often in defiance of local rules. Last week, Brazil recorded 7,677 deaths, the most fatalities in any week since the outbreak began.