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Residents in Brazil'snortheastern state of Pernambuco were bracing for more days of heavy rain after at least 91 people were killed as downpours triggered floods and landslides, according to the Civil Defense, CNN reported.

A further 26 people are still reported missing, said the Civil Defense on Twitter.

The state governor, Paulo Câmara, said that many more people could be unaccounted for.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro spoke to the press after visiting the area on Monday.

"Unfortunately, these catastrophes happen," Bolsonaro said during a press conference, saying "similar problems" happened before in other cities affected by heavy floods.

"We flew over the affected area, tried to land but, following recommendation from the pilots, decided not to due to inconsistency of the soil," Bolsonaro told reporters, according to CNN.

Since heavy rains began on Wednesday, nearly 4,000 have lost their houses, according to CNN Brasil. Fourteen municipalities have declared a state of emergency. 

The Pernambuco civil defense has urged residents living in high-risk areas around the city of Recife to seek shelter elsewhere after the rain caused landslides there. Schools in Recife have opened to shelter displaced families.

Brazil's northeast has been suffering from exceptionally high volumes of rain, officials say. Some areas have registered more rain in a 24-hour period over the weekend than the total volume expected for the month of May. 

Some parts of the state had a reprieve from the rain Monday as showers moved toward the coast, but Pernambuco is forecast to get another 30-60 mm of rain in the next two days, while isolated areas could see over 100 mm. The region could experience more than half a month's worth of rainfall in just four days, between Saturday over the weekend until the end of Tuesday, CNN reported.

Gusts -- which can lead to power outages and falling debris -- could also be as high has 100 kph.

The weekend downpour triggered the fourth major flooding event in five months in Brazil, according to a Reuters report, which highlighted a lack of urban planning in low-income neighborhoods throughout much of the country. Favelas -- slums or shantytowns -- are often erected on hillsides prone to giving way, usually outside major cities.

In December, downpours caused two dams to burst in nearby Bahia state, killing dozens and submerging entire streets, according to CNN.

The black box of the crashed Tara Air plane has been recovered on Tuesday. 

The plane with call sign 9N-AET, which had gone missing since Sunday, was found crashed on Monday morning. The wreckage of the aircraft was found scattered at Sanosware in Mustang district this morning.

There were 22 people including two German nationals, four Indians and 13 Nepali nationals on board the ill-fated aircraft when the incident occurred.

The plane had taken off for Jomson from Pokhara at 9: 55 am on Sunday.

It has been learnt that the aircraft was scheduled to fly at 6: 15 am but got delayed due to bad weather.

This is the seventh crash in the Pokhara-Jomsom route in the last three decades.

Black box is a small machine that records information about an aircraft during its flight, used to discover the cause of an accident.

Shanghai will move into a normalised epidemic-control phase from Wednesday and will allow malls and shops to reopen and people in "low-risk" areas to return to work, city officials said on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

Railways will also resume normal operations and the number of domestic flights to the city will increase, vice mayor Zong Ming told an online press conference, adding that they will also look to adjust passenger load factors. 

Public venues, however, will still need to cap people flows at 75% of capacity and people will need to show a negative PCR test taken within the last 72 hours to enter, according to Reuters.

The city announced an end to its two-month lockdown on Monday.

Chandrapala Weerasuriya can’t remember when he last took his medication. The 67-year-old retired businessman, living in Sri Lanka’s Gampaha district, has always relied on a drug to keep at bay his hereditary nervous condition, which makes him dizzy and unable to walk, The Guardian reported.

But since his prescription recently ran out, he cannot get another supply. The drug is simply not available in Sri Lanka any more.

“I am afraid that I might become paralysed because there is no one to care for us,” he said fretfully. “My wife and I do everything alone. We split the household chores and manage it between ourselves. My wife has a knee problem and she can barely walk.”

Sri Lanka’s financial crisis, its worst since independence, is swiftly becoming an alarming health crisis. The government’s coffers have fallen to their lowest levels on record and last week the country was forced to default on its international loans for the first time in its history. Without crucial foreign currency, Sri Lanka has been unable to import the essentials: food, fuel – and medicine.

Sri Lanka imports more than 80% of its medical supplies. Now almost 200 medical items are in shortage, including 76 essential, life-saving drugs, from blood-thinners for heart attack and stroke patients to antibiotics, rabies vaccines and cancer chemotherapy drugs. Essential surgical equipment and anaesthesia is running out so fast that the decision was made this week for only emergency surgeries, mostly heart and cancer patients, to go ahead. All routine surgeries – anything from hernias to swollen appendixes – have been put on hold. Some government hospitals have been instructed to only admit emergency patients, according to The Guardian.

“Ultimately, people are definitely going to die,” said a doctor in Colombo who had been told not to speak to the media.

She described how the hospital was so low on certain drugs they had to instruct families of patients to go out to pharmacies and try to buy it themselves. “There have been incidents where the family members have gone around looking for drugs and by the time they’ve come back with the drug, it’s been too late and the patient has died,” she said.

The doctor said the shortages were getting worse. “I’m worried about pregnant mothers because soon I don’t know whether we will have enough drugs to perform cesarian sections,” she said.

Cancer drugs, which are notoriously expensive to import, have been particularly badly hit by shortages in recent weeks, and the responsibility to source them has fallen on the heads of oncologists themselves. They have been putting out global appeals for donations, and writing letters to private supporters, organisations and governments, to ensure cancer treatments are not delayed.

Dr Buddhika Somawardana, an oncologist at Colombo’s largest cancer hospital, described the “great stress” he and other doctors were under as essential cancer drugs began to run out over a month ago or stopped being available at all, The Guardian reported.

“One of the drugs we give patients undergoing chemotherapy, which boosts their blood count so they aren’t liable to serious infections, is not available any more,” he said. “So far, we managed to get donation of 80,000 vials. But that will not last very long.”

He added: “Somehow, thanks to donations, we have mostly been managing without any huge issues. But we had to postpone some chemotherapy, which may have detrimental effects on the cancer outcome.”

Somawardana said the crisis was placing a huge “financial and psychological burden” on cancer patients, who were having to source and pay vast sums for their own medicines to continue their treatment, previously free and easily accessibly in hospitals under Sri Lanka’s lauded universal healthcare system.

Cancer doctors too were feeling the pressure of having to be the ones both to appeal for global drug donations, as well as treat their patients. “I didn’t know how long we will be able to go on like this,” he said.

Ruvaiz Haniffa, a doctor in Colombo, expressed his frustration that doctors had “seen this coming as early as January” but little had been done by authorities to set up backup plans to ensure no medicines ran short, even as the country’s foreign reserves began to deplete to worryingly low levels, according to The Guardian.