"People were in the aisles, on the floor with no beds, no masks," Ary Neto says, describing what's become of the hospitals in his home town in Brazil, which is still in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr Neto lives in Melbourne – nearly 15,000 kilometres away from his family who are based near the city of Manaus, in Brazil's Amazon region.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, he's lost three close family members, including his 60-year-old mother Rosemay Oran Barros Ribeiro.
She tested positive for COVID-19 on Christmas Eve and died a week later.
While Mr Neto, who works as a chef, wanted to travel home to be with family, his aunt convinced him to stay in Australia as Brazil's hospitals are overwhelmed.
Intensive care unit beds are operating at above 90 per cent capacity around the country, and a shortage of graves is looming.
Some old plots have been dug up for fresh graves and Brazil's biggest city, São Paolo, said it would begin opening around 600 plots per day.
"It's really hard to talk about," Mr Neto said.
"Mum was pretty young, she could have lived more.
"When she passed away, [I] couldn't do anything … they put my mum's body in a plastic bag and then she went from the hospital to a specific place where they put bodies [infected] with COVID-19."
Brazil, one of the few countries that remains open to international travel, now records around a quarter of the world's daily coronavirus deaths.
There are now close to 341,000 total COVID-19-related deaths tallied in Brazil, which comes second to the United States' total of 559,000 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.
With more than 4,000 deaths in one day last week, and a steady rise in fatalities since February, several doctors have predicted Brazil could soon surpass the death tallies recorded in the US.
And while the US has steadily brought the number of deaths down since mid-January by ramping up its vaccination efforts, COVID-19 vaccines have been scarce in Brazil.
That, together with longstanding socio-economic inequalities and misinformation spouted by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have created the perfect storm for a new, more transmissible coronavirus variant that virologists discovered in Manaus in December to spread unabated.
Research from several medical journal articles has found the P.1 Brazilian variant is twice as infectious as the original COVID-19 strain, with a higher chance of reinfection.
It has lead to a renewed surge in case numbers, particularly among young people.
A Brazilian politician, and one of Mr Bolsonaro's political opponents, Guilherme Boulos, tweeted the staggering death tally saying, "Brazil has become a graveyard".
'Worse by the day'
Nina Freitas, a Brazilian student studying hospitality management in Melbourne, fears the worst for her family back home in Rio de Janeiro.
Her father, a doctor, was working in a hospital before the situation worsened, and has now chosen to stay at home due to his age and health concerns.
She also worries about how the current political leadership has affected people back home.
Paul Bernasconi, an Australian married to a Brazilian man, splits his time between the US and the coastal town of Guarujá, about an hour-and-a-half drive south from São Paulo.
"I think what happened is that the [Brazilian government] dropped the ball in getting available medical units in place, so they're way behind," he said.
Mr Bernasconi said the handling of the pandemic in Brazil has been disorganised in comparison to his experience during the peak of the New York outbreak, where the local governor ordered relevant medical supplies and built makeshift hospitals early.
While the medical system in Guarujá hasn't had the "chaotic breakdown" like other cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Manaus, the virus was still close to home, he said.
"Personally, we had several members of our own family contract the disease and sadly, my husband's sister passed away just last week," he said.
"The saddest part of all this is that we have to stay isolated from our family members here so we can't even go through the normal grieving process together."
Misinformation, mismanagement from the top
Brazil's universal healthcare system is free for anyone legally living in the country, but its response towards the pandemic has largely been political.
Mr Bolsonaro has consistently opposed quarantine measures, arguing the damage to the economy would be worse than the effects of the coronavirus itself.
He has told Brazilians to "stop whining" about the pandemic and suggested the use of a malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a cure.
The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in Brazil has also been slow – so far only around 2 per cent of Brazil's 211 million population have been vaccinated.
Drug manufacturer Pfizer said in a statement Mr Bolsonaro had refused an offer to purchase 70 million vaccines in August 2020.
At the time, Mr Bolsonaro said he would not get vaccinated and publicly joked that the Pzifer vaccine could "turn people into crocodiles".
Mr Bolsonaro has also appointed four different health ministers since the pandemic started, including one who lasted less than a month.
The revolving door of health ministers has largely been due to disagreements with Mr Bolsonaro over how to best handle the virus.
The latest appointee, cardiologist Marcelo Queiroga, replaced General Eduardo Pazuello, an army officer with no medical training who became publicly unpopular due to his mismanagement of the health response to the pandemic.
Brazil has just recently ramped up its purchases of vaccine supplies from Pzifer, AstraZeneca and Sinovac, despite the earlier pushback from Mr Bolsonaro.
Preliminary research found Sinovac has so far been proven to be 51 per cent effective towards the P.1 variant.
However, for so many who have already lost loved ones, the disappointment and grief remain.
