'The country is adrift': echoes of Spanish flu as Brazil's Covid-19 catastrophe deepens

A century after the 1918 pandemic, South America's largest country has passed Britain to claim the world's second-highest death toll

As a child growing up in 1940s Sao Paulo, Drauzio Varella remembers his grandmother's tales of how the Spanish flu ravaged the blue-collar immigrant community they called home.

So many people died that families would leave people outside on the pavements, and early each morning the carts would come by to collect them and take them off to burial in mass graves," remembered Varella, who would go on to become Brazil's best-known doctor.