Brazil on June 19 became the second country after the US to surpass 500,000 Covid-19 deaths as the South American giant grapples with a third wave of the pandemic.

Health minister Marcelo Queiroga tweeted: “500,000 lives lost due to the pandemic that affects our Brazil and the world.”

The health ministry reported 500,800 deaths, including 2,301 in the last 24 hours, a toll that many experts say underestimate the real toll from the health crisis.

This week the average number of daily deaths surpassed 2,000 for the first time since May 10.

“The third wave is arriving, there’s already in a change in the case and death curves,” Ethel Maciel, an epidemiologist from Espirito Santo University, told AFP.

“Our vaccination [programme], which could make a difference, is slow and there are no signs of restrictive measures, quite the contrary.”

In large cities, life seems almost back to normal with restaurants, bars and shops open and many people in the streets not wearing face masks.

And yet the situation is critical in 19 of Brazil’s 27 states with more than 80 per cent occupancy of intensive care beds – in nine of those states it’s over 90 per cent.

The “second wave”, from January to April this year, was particularly deadly.

The number of deaths increased exponentially with the arrival of the Gamma virus variant that originated in Manaus, in the north of Brazil.

It gradually began to fall last month thanks in part to the closure of businesses when the pandemic was at its worst.

But many epidemiologists believe lockdown restrictions were lifted too soon at a time when daily deaths were still up around the 2,000 mark.

Contrary to what has been seen in Europe, there’s been no real trough between the different waves in Brazil.

Alexandre da Silva, a specialist in public health at the University of Sao Paulo, said: “I don’t know if it’s a third wave … it seems we never got out of the first one.

“It seems the pandemic has now turned into a marathon runner who is pacing his race. It’s not a sprinter who does his sprint but then loses power.”

Brazil has recently received several batches of vaccines, including from US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, but the country has only managed to fully vaccinate 11 per cent of the population, with 29 per cent receiving one dose.

The vaccination drive began late in mid-January using the AstraZeneca and Sinovac’s CoronaVac jabs.

Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who previously hit out at vaccines, has promised to immunise the entire population by the end of the year – something specialists consider unlikely.

Bolsonaro has been criticised for downplaying the pandemic from the outset, opposing lockdown measures and plugging unproven medical treatments for Covid, and on June 19 thousands of Brazilians again took to the streets in protest against him.

In rallies in Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and elsewhere, people carried banners with slogans like “Bolsonaro must go” or simply “500,000”.

“His position on Covid and his denialism are absurd. He has abandoned reality and common sense. There is no explaining this, it is surreal,” said Robert Almeida, a 50-year-old photographer marching in Rio.

“500,000 deaths from a disease for which there is now a vaccine, in a country that has been a world leader in vaccination. There is a word for that: genocide,” leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva tweeted. “Solidarity with the people of Brazil.”