Jason Silva, 24, when he hit the coronavirus in the Brazilian Amazon town of Altamira. He played football, practiced martial arts, studied physical education at a local university and active in an organization that protested against the environmental and social damage caused by hydroelectric dams in the area, such as the prominent Belo Monte.
According to Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, a populist Holocaust holocaust denier who attacks isolation measures and calls the pandemic a “small flu,” Silva’s age and fitness deserve to be rid of the virus. Bolsonaro, 65, said his own sporting experience would protect him from the Covid-19. After revealing that the disease had stuck on July 7, he said the young men had no explanation for worrying.
Instead, Silva has become ill. He tried to get to the hospital, but was only admitted after 4 visits to a local gym and a social media crusade through friends and family. Just days after arriving at the hospital on July 6, Silva died.
“I won’t forget how amazing, smart, intelligent, cheerful and kind I was,” said her friend Victia Paes, a student who worked with Silva to deliver lunches. “It released a positive power that inflamed anyone who was around.”
With 2,098 million instances shown and 79,488 deaths as of July 20, the Covid-19 crisis in Brazil is the worst in the world, after the United States.
Silva’s death is part of the most recent and worrying wave of victims of Brazil’s coronavirus pandemic. After ravaging major cities, the virus spreads throughout Brazil. Brazilians like Silva are dying in remote villages whose fitness systems cannot take over the workload. And doctors and fitness experts say Bolsonaro’s rejection of the pandemic has baffled Brazilians, eroded locks, and helped spread Covid-19.
“When it is not done scientifically and technically, it confuses other people with less knowledge and becomes a pandemic that requires a technical reaction in a political struggle,” said Julio Croda, a medical professor who headed Brazil’s Ministry of Fitness until March. Department of Communicable Diseases and Immunization. “It’s very harmful.”
In Brazil, states that have been heavily affected by coronavirus when it began to spread across the country are watching the disease slow down. These spaces reduce isolation and open parks, restaurants and gyms. However, within the country, deaths are on the rise.
The village of Dourados had 3,729 cases as of July 20, or nearly a quarter of all infections in its Mato Grosso do Sul state of residence. Andyane Tetila, an infectious disease specialist who runs for his public fitness department, said hospitals may soon not be able to handle the burden.
Bolsonaro’s position “did nothing,” he said. “We see this as a big problem.”
The interior of Brazil is vulnerable to coronavirus. According to the Fiocruz government research institute, by February, 90 percent of Brazilian municipalities had no extensive attention beds and 59 percent had no respirators. In Altamira, two hospitals serve nine municipalities around them; The city now has 28 extensive care beds for another 340,000 people, but only 18 when Silva died.
While Latin America has a Covid-19 access point, Brazil’s neighbor, Argentina, has been blocked. Although Argentina has a quarter of Brazil’s 212 million inhabitants, it accounts for only 6% of its workload. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, argued that isolation measures would cause economic damage and unemployment, and instead fought the closure.
“The side effects of coronavirus measurements can’t be worse than the actual disease,” he said in a televised confrontation in March. Without a mask, he was continuously mingling with crowds of far-right supporters, even riding among them. Regarding the impressive death toll in Brazil, he said, “So what?”
Bolsonaro is popular in Amazonian villages such as Altamira, where 63% of the electorate voted for him in the 2018 elections. Last month, commercial homeowners protested against closures.
“The president’s stance largely explains why people don’t practice social isolation,” said Altamira doctor Renan Granato. “He’s been given a lot of followers here.”
Jason Silva dismayed, said his girlfriend, for the number of other people in the unmasked village (e.g. crowded supermarkets), as well as by the president’s denial of the pandemic.
Left / Up: Photo of Jason only taken on Tree Day in the municipality of Brazil Novo, Paro State on September 21, 2019. Right/Down: Jason (right) and Welinton Freitas (left) on June 6, 2020, in the ‘gua Azul’ deal in Altamira, Paro State. Photos: Coletivo de Comunnica-ao do MAB
As coronavirus cases increased, Silva and his fellow activists from the Dam-Affected People Movement, a national network that deals with the environmental and social effects of hydroelectric and commercial dams, distributed food to the poorest Brazilians who lost their jobs or source of income. Pandemic. Coronavirus has hit the poorest Brazilians in densely populated communities with great force. Local and national networks have been created to help them.
In the midst of his self-help work, Silva washed his garments every single time he went to the house and controlled himself as much as he could.
He first became ill on June 16. When he entered the municipal hospital, he had a fever of more than 102 degrees, a scan showing that between 25 and 30% of his lungs were compromised and a low point of oxygen saturation in the area. 87% blood, Paes said. Two days later, Silva was transferred to a state hospital, the only one in the region with large beds of care.
“There is a queue for any of the hospitals,” said Granato, Altamira’s doctor who trained as a surgeon and now works in intensive care. “The rooms and the extensive care beds are at their maximum capacity.”
On 19 June, the structure of a 60-bed cash hospital in Altamira was completed, 10 of which will be for intensive care but did not open until July 17.
“The municipality of Altamira is recently facing unrest with beds of extensive attention,” a city government spokesman said in an email on July 10. He said the legal legal responsibility of the people is “basic care” and that Silva receives oxygen at the municipal hospital. waited for a bed of intensive care. “The municipality deeply regrets the loss of some other life,” he said.
Brazil one step ahead of the pandemic. His first cases of Covid-19 were reported in February. In March, states such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo closed schools and department stores and implemented isolation measures promoted by health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, a physician.
In March, Bolsonaro said fewer than 800 people would die from coronavirus in Brazil. However, his fitness ministry published a six-figure projection of the death toll, if nothing was done, said Croda, the professor and former ministry official.
Official warnings have been diluted. In mid-March, the Ministry of Health issued a bulletin. Soon after, it was amended and now says “excluded advice for technical review”. The review was never carried out: until a few days ago, the ministry’s online page said it was “updating the rules on isolation and social estrangement” and recently removed the sentence, without offering the rules.
When the Brazilian summer became autumn, in March, Bolsonaro issued a decree that gave him the strength for what can be fair and what cannot remain open. Brazil’s Supreme Court rejected it and ruled that states and cities can simply make their own decisions and that Bolsonaro did not have the strength to “exercise a genocidal public policy,” as it is said.
A Health Department spokesman informed The Intercept that the federal government now had a more regional approach. “The measures must be taken according to the wishes of each region,” the spokesman said in an email. He added that the Ministry of Health had funded 9,200 beds of extensive care and had hired more than 6,000 fitness professionals.
Mandetta, the Minister of Health, gave detailed reports that public fitness experts applauded. But before the end of March, the Bolsonaro government would intervene. He established a “crisis cabinet” and installed his chief of staff, retired General Walter Souza Braga Netto, to lead public policy on the pandemic.
“The Ministry of Health no longer led Covid’s actions,” Croda said. The shift forced him to leave his post. In April, Mandetta fired.
Brazil’s Covid-19 has begun to collapse.
Mandetta’s successor was Nelson Teich, an oncologist who resigned a month later after refusing to help Bolsonaro’s insistence on boosting the remedy with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, a drug driven by Bolsonaro’s ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, and who could not prove that he was helping Covid. -19 patients. Array In May, Brazil recommended medicines even for mild cases of Covid-19. On July 7, after testing positive, Bolsonaro gave the impression on a video with a tablet in his hand and said, “I accept as true with hydroxychloroquine, right?”
The Health Ministry said it had distributed 4.4 million chloroquine pills, millions of which were produced through the army. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency approval for any of the drugs due to “known risks,” some of which can be fatal.
“They focus on the remedy without clinical evidence,” Croda said. “The branch is not doing anything from a technical point of view.”
The sense that the Bolsonaro government is adrift was shown through many in May, when the video of a ministerial oath assembly was released on the orders of a Supreme Court judge.
The pandemic has been mentioned slightly. The Minister of Human Rights, Damares Alves, argued that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon were intentionally inflamed with Covid-19 to harm the president: an ordinary statement that other participants ignored. Bolsonaro seemed more involved in the long term of his own government. “We still don’t know … where our ship is going,” he said, bringing out the virus. “He may be heading for an iceberg.”
Brazil still has a fitness minister. The acting minister, General Eduardo Pazuello, is one of many army officers who are in the ministry lately, but has no fitness experience. “What’s scarier is the number of officials they put in. Race technicians were dismissed to name the colonel, captain and sergeant,” Mandetta told the newspaper O Globo in comments published on July 15. It’s absurd. “
(The subsidiary “has a technical staff of skilled workers that normality of its activities,” the spokesman said.
Brazil’s Covid-19 statistics have also been largely tested due to a lack of widespread information. Brazil conducted 2.1 million antibody tests, 945,000 of them in personal laboratories, the Ministry of Health said, and 2.6 million less accurate “fast” tests, less than one-tenth of what Teich had promised to buy. The United States, on the other hand, has conducted nearly 50 million tests, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In June, Brazil’s Ministry of Health even stopped publishing the total number of deaths and instances until a Supreme Court ruled on the intervention and ordered that reports resume.
Jesem Orellana, an epidemiologist at Fiocruz, said he believed the total number of deaths in Brazil could be 90,000 to 100,000, as many sick people are buried without evidence or even in the hospital. He and 4 other researchers estimated 22,000 more deaths in just 4 cities (Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Manaus and Fortaleza) from February 23 to June 13, compared to the 2015-2019 averages for the same periods.
In the Amazon city of Manaus, where Orellana is headquartered, overcrowded hospitals sent the sick in poor health and the sick were buried in mass graves when cases peaked in April. Deaths in houses in Manaus and outdoor hospitals increased by 363% between February 9 and May 10, compared to 201 nine, he said, a building due to Covid-1nine. Some of the subsequent deaths due to other reasons here occurred when other people were unable or too afraid to move to crowded hospitals.
“This is the scope of the collapse,” Orellana said.
Brazil’s public fitness service, called SUS, serves 70% of the population that has no fitness plans. In 2016, under the chairmanship of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil praised its handling of a Zika outbreak attributed to thousands of cases of microcephaly from birth defects. Now epidemiologist in Fiocruz, Brasilia, Maierovitch one of the officials of the Ministry of Health in the index of this response. He thinks that with Bolsonaro, the Brazilian government has failed. “There is no national plan, ” he said. “This is a blatant omission of the government component.”
In some parts of Brazil, civil society, personal corporations and NGOs have mobilized to fill the void by building hospitals, respirators and protective equipment.
When the covid-19 instances rose in May, the remote Amazonian city of Tefé improvised its own beds of “semi-intensive care” with respirators. Doctors Without Borders helped exercise number one care to care for critically ill patients in the city. The region had recorded 81 deaths as of July 19.
“Cities and states had to act for themselves,” Said Laura Crivellari, a in Tefé. “We feel very alone.”
As of July 19, Altamira had reported 2,708 cases of Covid-19 and deaths. “Cases are increasing,” Granato said.
Jason Silva’s death showed the burden of local communities fighting for the own in a difficult battle. His cades of helping each other in a resource crisis did not go unnoticed in the community: Silva lamented a lot in Altamira.
“I’ll never know how much people liked to help,” Vicria Paes said. “He made a difference.”