A third senator has died of Covid-19 in Brazil, raising questions around precautions taken in the country’s Congress where as many as one-in-three lawmakers has been infected with the virus devastating Latin America’s largest nation.

Senator Major Olimpio, a former police officer who backed and later fell out with far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, was declared brain dead on Thursday by doctors at a Sao Paulo hospital where he had been in intensive care for three weeks.