Toll soars but push to reopen
President Jair Bolsonaro repeated his call for Brazil to be fully reopened yesterday as his country’s coronavirus death toll rose to the third worst in the world and its daily fatality rate nudged towards 1500.
In an online video shortly before the numbers were released, Bolsonaro said that Brazil ‘‘can’t go on like this . . . nobody can take it any more’’ – a reference not to deaths but his opposition to shutdowns by state governors. ‘‘The collateral impact will be far greater than those people who unfortunately lost their lives.’’
Brazilian authorities then posted a daily record of 1473 deaths, close to the worst days in the United States at the start of April. Brazil’s official number of infections stand at nearly 615,000, with more than 34,000 deaths, behind only the US and Britain. Health experts have said that Brazil’s peak is still probably weeks away.
This week Bolsonaro confirmed that Eduardo Pazuello, a serving general with no government experience, would continue as acting health minister after the resignation and sacking of two predecessors, Nelson Teich and Luiz Henrique Mandetta, for opposing the use of the antimalarial drug chloroquine and Bolsonaro’s resistance to lockdown.
Pazuello has appointed Carlos Wizard Martins, 63, a billionaire who runs the country’s KFC and Pizza Hut franchises, as his science and technology secretary. Martins said that he would seek to cut department budgets and expand the use of chloroquine. The Times