Brazil virus toll 250,000 amid unchecked spread
Brazil’s Covid-19 death toll, which surpassed 250,000 yesterday, is the world’s second-highest for the same reason its second wave has yet to fade: Prevention was never a priority.
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, said.
Whereas other countries’ daily cases and deaths have fallen, in each of the last five weeks, Brazil has averaged more than 1000 daily deaths. Official data showed a confirmed death toll of 251,498 yesterday.
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.
Alves and other public health experts say the spread continues to be facilitated by authorities’ reluctance to follow recommendations from international health organisations to implement stricter restrictions on activity. It is up to governors and mayors to impose lockdowns or restrictions to contain the virus. The states of Sao Paulo and Bahia recently introduced curfews, asking residents to stay at home at night. 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. “‘Lockdown’ has become a curse word in Brazil.”
Miguel Nicolelis, a prominent Brazilian neurologist, warned in January that Brazil had to either enter lockdown or “we won’t be able to bury our dead in 2021”.
“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. “Everyone will witness the epic devastation.”
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 immunisation 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 programmes and its large nationwide public health care network led many experts to believe that immunisation 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.
Five weeks after the first shot, Brazil has delivered shots to only 3.6 per cent 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.
Meantime, the virus continues to run rampant across Brazil, and take its toll. In the city of Araraquara, in the interior of Sao Paulo state, there have been more deaths so far this year than all of last year and intensive-care unit occupancy reached 110 per cent. Local authorities responded on February 21 by announcing a full lockdown — the second of its kind since the beginning of the pandemic. ICU occupancy has since dipped to 100 per cent.