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By Lisandra Paraguassu and Pedro Fonseca
BRASILIA / RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – The death toll in Brazil by COVID-19 exceeded 100,000 on Saturday and continues to rise as Brazilian cities reopen their department stores and restaurants, even though the pandemic has not yet reached its peak.
Faced with the deadliest epidemic since the Spanish flu a century ago, Brazil reported its first cases of new coronavirus last February. The virus took 3 months to kill another 50,000 people and only 50 days to kill the next 50,000.
Led by President Jair Bolsonaro, who downplayed the severity of the pandemic and fought the lockdowns through local officials, Brazilians who protested each and every night from their windows in the early months of the epidemic took this grim step by shrugging.
“We live in despair, because it’s a tragedy like a global war. But Brazil is under collective anesthesia,” said Dr. José Davi Urbaez, a senior member of the Society of Infectious Diseases.
He and other public fitness experts have sounded the alarm that Brazil still has a coordinated plan to combat the pandemic, while many officials are focusing on “reopening,” which is likely to be to stimulate the spread of the disease and worsen the epidemic.
The Ministry of Health reported 49,970 new programs and 905 deaths on Saturday in more than 24 hours, bringing the number to more than 3 million and the death toll to 100,477.
The Supreme Court and the Congress of Brazil, establishments that have criticized Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic, have declared 3 and 4 days of national mourning for the 100,000 deaths respectively. The president has commented on it publicly.
Two fitness ministers, both doctors, resigned due to disputes with Bolsonaro. The acting minister of health is an army general who has defected from the call for social estrangement, which is a fundamental genius, but the president opposes it.
Bolsonaro, who has COVID-19, a “small flu,” says he has recovered from his own hydroxychloroquine infection, an antimalarial drug that has not yet been shown to oppose coronavirus.
“We don’t know where it’s going to end, maybe 150, 000 or 200,000 deaths. Only time will show the full effect of COVID-19 here,” said Alexandre Naime, head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Sao Paulo State University.
He said the comparison may be only diseases transmitted by colonizers, such as smallpox, which decimated indigenous peoples when Europeans first arrived in the Americas.
Although this story was long over, Urbaez said Brazil is now also resigned to coVID-19’s long-term deaths.
“Today’s government’s message is, ‘get your coronavirus and if it’s severe, there’s amp to pay for ampage.’ That sums up our policy today,” Said Urbaez of the Society of Infectious Diseases.
(Reporting through Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia and Pedro Fonseca in Rio de Janeiro, additional report through Maria Carolina Marcello and Sabrina Valle; written through Anthony Boadle; edited through Brad Haynes and Leslie Adler)