CROIX-DES-BOUQUETS, Haiti (AP) — A prison director was among at least eight people killed Thursday after several inmates tried to escape from a prison in Haiti’s capital, a police officer and witnesses said.

The incident occurred in northeast Port-au-Prince at the Croix-des-Bouquets Civil Prison, which was built by Canada in 2012 and is known for a 2014 breakout in which more than 300 inmates escaped.

Residents in the area who declined to be identified out of concern for their safety told The Associated Press that they observed a group of heavily armed men start shooting at prison guards before the inmates began to flee.

Gunshots could still be heard from within the prison several hours after the shooting began.

The police officer who confirmed the killing of the prison director to the AP, and declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said authorities were preparing to raid the prison and described the inmates as armed and dangerous.

At the time of the 2014 breakout, the prison held 899 inmates, some 130 over its capacity.

During Thursday’s incident, one escapee, 37-year-old Jhon Hippolyte, was shot in the back. He told the AP that he was serving a sentence for murder and was in the infirmary when he noticed everybody running and decided to join them.

AP journalists saw the bodies of at least seven men along streets near the prison. They had been shot. Their identities were not immediately available, and it wasn’t clear if they were inmates or who had killed them.

Video captured by residents shows one police officer leading a group of men tied together with a rope. It wasn’t immediately clear if they were inmates.

Authorities could not be immediately reached for comment.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s COVID-19 death toll, which surpassed 250,000 on Thursday, is the world’s second-highest for the same reason its second wave has yet to fade: Prevention was never made a priority, experts say.

Since the pandemic’s start, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro scoffed at the “little flu” and lambasted local leaders for imposing restrictions on activity; he said the economy must keep humming along to prevent worse hardship.

Even when he approved pandemic welfare payments for the poor, they weren’t announced as a means to keep people home. And Brazilians remain out and about as vaccination has started up — but rollout has proven far slower than was anticipated.

“Brazil simply didn’t have a response plan. We’ve been through this for the last year and still we don’t have a clear plan, a national plan,” Miguel Lago, executive director of Brazil’s Institute for Health Policy Studies, which advises public health officials, told the Associated Press. “There’s no plan, at all. And the same applies to vaccination.”

Whereas other countries’ daily cases and deaths have fallen, Latin America’s largest nation is parked on an elevated plateau — a grim repeat of mid-2020. In each of the last five weeks, Brazil has averaged more than 1,000 daily deaths. Official data showed a confirmed death toll total of 251,498 on Thursday.

At least 12 Brazilian states are in the midst of a second wave even worse than the one faced in 2020, said Domingos Alves, an epidemiologist who has been tracking COVID-19 data.

“This scenario is going to get worse,” Alves told the AP, adding that the virus was spreading faster among the population. In Amazonas state, where the capital, Manaus, saw hospitals run out of oxygen last month, there have been more than 5,000 deaths in the first two months of the year, about as many as in all of 2020.

“It is the most difficult moment that we have had since the confirmation of the first case,” Carlos Lula, chair of the National Council of Health Secretaries, was quoted as saying Thursday by O Globo newspaper. ”We have never had so many states with so much difficulty at the same time.”

Alves and other public health experts said the spread is exacerbated by authorities’ reluctance to follow recommendations from international health organizations to implement stricter restrictions.

It is up to governors and mayors to impose lockdowns or other restrictions to contain the virus. The states of Sao Paulo and Bahia recently introduced nighttime curfews, but experts say the moves are too late and insufficient.

“They are not containment measures; they are palliative measures, always taken after the fact,” said Alves, who is also an adjunct professor of social medicine at the University of Sao Paulo. “‘Lockdown’ has become a curse word in Brazil.”

Miguel Nicolelis, a prominent Brazilian neuroscientist, warned in January that Brazil had to either enter lockdown or “we won’t be able to bury our dead in 2021.” He had been advising northeastern states on how to combat COVID-19, but recently left his position, dissatisfied with their refusal to go into lockdown, the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper reported.

“Right now, Brazil is the largest open-air laboratory, where it is possible to observe the natural dynamics of the coronavirus without any effective containment measure,” he wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Everyone will witness the epic devastation.”

There are some exceptions, but they remain marginal and have failed to inspire a broader movement.

Sao Luis, capital of northeastern Maranhao state, was the first Brazilian city to go into full lockdown last May. It was successful, notwithstanding Bolsonaro’s efforts to undermine the restrictions and sow doubt about their efficacy, according to the state’s governor, Flávio Dino.

“It has been very difficult to manage distance and prevention measures,” Dino said, adding that the first obstacle was an economic and social one, especially after the federal government’s emergency pandemic aid program ended last year.

Lago noted that Bolsonaro rarely even comments on the pandemic anymore, and has effectively moved on to other priorities, including securing support in Congress for loosening gun control laws and passing economic reforms. His administration is seeking to reinstate some COVID-19 welfare payments, but for a smaller group of needy Brazilians.

The only preventative measure Bolsonaro consistently supported was the use of treatments like hydroxychloroquine, which showed no benefit in rigorous studies.

Bolsonaro’s administration has also adopted a hands-off approach regarding the vaccination campaign. It relied mostly on a deal to purchase a single vaccine, AstraZeneca, which has been slow in coming. The national immunization effort to date has relied mostly on Chinese-made CoronaVac shots secured by Sao Paulo state, though the federal government is now trying to buy others.

Brazil’s decades of experience with successful vaccination programs and its large nationwide public health care network led many experts to believe that immunization — even if it were to start with a delay — would be a relatively speedy affair. In previous campaigns, the nation of 210 million was able to vaccinate as many as 10 million people in a single day, health experts noted.

Five weeks after the first shot, Brazil has vaccinated only 3.6% of its population. That is more than double Argentina and Mexico, but less than one-fourth that of Chile, according to Our World in Data, an online research site that compares official government statistics.

“There is no way to be fast with a shortage of vaccines; that is the crucial point,” said Carla Domingues, who for eight years coordinated Brazil’s national vaccination program, until leaving her position in 2019. “Until there is greater supply, the speed will be slower, as you have to keep selecting who can be vaccinated.”

Meantime, the virus continues to run rampant across Brazil, and take its toll.

In the Sao Paulo state city of Araraquara there have been more deaths so far this year than all of last year and intensive-care unit occupancy surpassed full capacity, with people on waiting lists to enter ICUs and get treatment. Local authorities responded Sunday by announcing a full lockdown — making Araraquara only the second city to impose such a restriction.

“We never imagined we would reach this point,” said Fabiana Araújo, a nurse and a coordinator of the city’s committee to fight COVID-19. “It was the only option.”

—— AP writers David Biller contributed from Rio and Mauricio Savarese from Sao Paulo.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The number of monarch butterflies that showed up at their winter resting grounds in central Mexico decreased by about 26% this year, and four times as many trees were lost to illegal logging, drought and other causes, making 2020 a bad year for the butterflies.

The government commission for natural protected areas said the butterflies’ population covered only 2.1 hectares (5.2 acres) in 2020, compared to 2.8 hectares (6.9 acres) the previous year and about one-third of the 6.05 hectares (14.95 acres) detected in 2018.

Because the monarchs cluster so densely in pine and fir trees, it is easier to count them by area rather than by individuals.

Gloria Tavera, the regional director of Mexico’s Commission for National Protected Areas, blamed the drop on “extreme climate conditions,” the loss of milkweed habitat in the United States and Canada on which butterflies depend, and deforestation in the butterflies’ wintering grounds in Mexico.

Illegal logging in the monarchs wintering rounds rose to almost 13.4 hectares (33 acres), a huge increase from the 0.43 hectare (1 acre) lost to logging last year.

Jorge Rickards of the WWF environmental group acknowledged the lost trees were a blow, but said “the logging is very localized” in three or four of the mountain communities that make up the butterfly reserve.

In addition, wind storms, drought and the felling of trees that had fallen victim to pine beetles or disease, caused the loss of another 6.9 hectares (17 acres) in the reserve, bringing the total forest loss in 2020 to 20.65 hectares (51 acres). That compares to an overall loss of about 5 hectares (12.3 acres) from all causes the previous year.

Tavera said the drought was affecting the butterflies themselves, as well as the pine and fir trees where the clump together for warmth.

“The severe drought we are experiencing is having effects,” Tavera said. “All the forests in the reserve are under water stress, the forests are dry.”

“The butterflies are looking for water on the lower slopes, near the houses,” she noted.

Tavera also expressed concern about the sever winter storms in Texas, which the butterflies will have to cross — and feed and lay their eggs — on their way back to their northern summer homes in coming months.

“This is a cause for worry,” Tavera said, referring to whether the monarchs will find enough food and habitat after the winter freeze.

It was also a bad year for the mountain farming communities that depend for part of their income on tourists who visit the reserves. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, visits fell from around 490,000 last year, to just 80,000 in the 2020-2021 season.

Environmentalist and writer Homero Aridjis, who grew up around the reserve, said the decline in butterflies and rise in logging was not surprising, given the reduction in Mexican government funding for protected natural areas and environmental work.

“While the reserves were closed to tourism during practically the whole (winter) season, the way was open for loggers, with no control,” Aridjis said. “The question is, can the monarch migration survive this environmental negligence?”

The U.S. group Center for Food Safety called for the monarchs to be granted endangered species protection, noting “the minimum population threshold needed to be out of the danger zone of extinction is six hectares.”

It was unclear whether the drop in tourism income contributed to the increased logging. Rickards said there has long been pressure on the area’s forests from people who want to open land for planting crops.

Felipe Martínez Meza, director of the butterfly reserve, said there have been attempts to plant orchards of avocados — hugely profitable crop for farmers in the area — in the buffer zones around the reserve.

The high mountain peaks where the butterflies clump in trees are probably a bit above the altitude where avocado trees like to grow, Martinez Meza said. But the buffer zones provide protection and support for the higher areas, and he said more must be done to combat the change in land use.

Frequently, illegal logging is carried out by outsiders or organized gangs, and not by the farm communities that technically own the land.

Millions of monarchs migrate from the U.S. and Canada each year to forests west of Mexico’s capital. The butterflies hit a low of just 0.67 hectares (1.66 acres) in 2013-2014.

Loss of habitat, especially the milkweed where the monarchs lay their eggs, pesticide and herbicide use, as well climate change, all pose threats to the species’ migration.

While there was plenty of bad news for the butterflies — very few showed up to some historic wintering sites like Sierra Chincua — there was the welcome news that a new wintering site was discovered nearby, in a mountaintop near the Lagunas de Zempoala protected area, near Mexico City.

Tavera said the wintering site had always been there, but was so difficult to reach that it wasn’t discovered until earlier this month.