RIO DE JANEIRO – Brazil passed the grim milestone of 180,000 deaths from Covid-19 yesterday, as experts warned that the country is undergoing a second wave of infections despite President Jair Bolsonaro’s insistence that the crisis is at the “tail end”.
The Health Ministry reported 672 new fatalities for a total of 180,437 since the pandemic began, making the South American country the second to pass that threshold after the US.
The curves for both infections and deaths in Brazil now show clear signs of an upward trend, after falling somewhat from late August to early last month.
Bolsonaro drew criticism from opponents this week for his latest comments downplaying the health crisis.
“We’re at the tail end of the pandemic. Compared (with) other countries in the world, our government was the best, or one of the best, in handling it,” said the far-right leader on Thursday.
Health experts disagreed.
“The president is wrong. I don’t know where he got that idea, but no indicator shows that” the end is near, said Christovam Barcellos, a researcher at Brazil’s leading public health research centre, Fiocruz.
In fact, infections are also rising sharply again. They surpassed the 54,000 mark yesterday, for a total of 6.8 million since the pandemic started.
Barcellos warned that the situation could get worse, with the holiday season and the southern hemisphere summer.
“There will be more people circulating, without control measures and with many of our social-distancing policies now dismantled,” he told AFP.
Bolsonaro has been at odds with health experts over how to respond to the coronavirus since even before it arrived in the country of 212 million people, with the first confirmed infection on February 26.
He has downplayed Covid-19 as a “little flu”, condemned the “hysteria” around it and pushed to use the drug hydroxychloroquine against the disease, despite a raft of studies showing it is ineffective.
Brazil, which endured a brutal plateau of more than 1,000 virus fatalities a day from June to August, had succeeded in bringing its average daily death toll down to about 300 last month.
However, the number rose again above 800 this week, before settling back to 639 yesterday.
Intensive care units in seven of the nation’s 27 state capitals are more than 90% full, and the field hospitals that supplemented them earlier in the year have been dismantled. – AFP, December 12, 2020
