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How was Brazil a global epicenter of the epidemic and what were the political consequences for its president, who tested positive for the virus and ruled out the dangers?
By Manuela Andreoni
Latin America was the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in May, due to the increase in the number of cases in Brazil, while the number of known infections in Europe decreased. Five months after its first case of Covid-19, Brazil has more than 3 million cases and 107,000 deaths.
Following the deaths of another 100,000 people in the country, President Jair Bolsonaro posted a message on Facebook protecting his government’s reaction to the virus.
“There is no shortage of resources, appliances or medicines,” he wrote.
Since early June, Brazil has reported more than 1,000 new deaths consistent with the day due to Covid-19, the coronavirus disease, overshadowing the number of deaths in all countries except the United States. Eleven states are consistent with a construction in some cases; nine have noticed that the instances are shrinking and six more in the capital, Brasilia, remain stable, according to a count carried out through the Folha newspaper in Sao Paulo in line with.
After being devastated by the virus, some major cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, Manaus and Sao Paulo, began to make preventive measures more flexible in mid-June. Field hospitals were closed as the number of others seeking medical care decreased.
But in mid-August, cases began to escalale in the city of Sao Paulo, and researchers warned of the symptoms of a momentary wave in other primary cities after the reopening of shopping malls, restaurants and beaches began to attract crowds.
The virus has also spread to giant rural areas and small towns. Today, almost all of Brazil’s more than 5,600 cities have reported cases of Covid-19.
Experts are involved in how temporarily the disease is spreading in areas with poor sanitation. More than 90% of Brazilian cities have an extensive care unit and more than the enthusiastic part until February, according to a study by Fiocruz, a government fitness studio. Some hospital systems are on the brink of extensive care bed shortages.
Transcription
From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. It’s The Daily.
Today: Brazil has a long and remarkable history of going through public fitness crises, until now. Ernesto Londoo about what he did with coronavirus.
It’s Thursday, July 2.
Okay, Ernesto, as we speak, Brazil is just a moment for the United States in the Covid-19 instances. Where did we begin to perceive how we were given here?
Well, Michael, while we’re looking at the first considerations about the spread of coronavirus beyond China, that’s as far away from the minds of Brazilians. You know, it’s the summer peak in the southern hemisphere and especially in February.
[CARNAVAL MUSIC]
People are in mode.
[CARNAVAL MUSIC]
You know, in Brazil, in big cities, other people celebrate the carnival, which becomes this week-long celebration.
You know, the beaches are crowded. There are community parties on the street where everyone dances and there are many other people kissing strangers. Everybody’s kind of a sweaty mess. There’s a lot of alcohol. And when other people start treating a hangover after the carnival in late February, the first case is diagnosed in Sao Paolo, Brazil’s largest city. And the first case considers a guy who had returned from Italy. And I don’t think there’s any panic alarm that went off at first, but it was temporarily replaced in early March. And that replaced after an ordinary trip.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro traveled with an entourage to Florida, where he dined at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump.
He does a job, a wonderful job. Brazil loves it and the United States loves it.
And when they return from this trip, several other people who were part of this delegation are starting to test positive.
The latest sign of the spread of the virus is that it reaches and threatens the toughest offices in the world.
The new virus comes from President Trump’s assembly with a delegation from Brazil to Florida.
This video shows Mr. Trump last weekend at Mar-a-Lago with a guy who has since done the virus test. He’s the press secretary of the Brazilian president.
Now we know that a dozen Brazilians who were there tested for the virus.
Then Brazil is fed because its leaders, the other people who run the country, suddenly began to get sick. But even though the virus is obviously in the halls of power, the president does not sound any alarms. Quite the opposite.
[IN PORTUGUESE]
My duty as head of state is to anticipate the problems, to bring the fact to the Brazilian people. But this fact must not cause panic.
President Bolsonaro is beginning to call the virus anything the media is obsessed with in order to reduce its popularity figures.
[IN PORTUGUESE]
He called it a fantasy. He said it’s a lean cold. He said that even if I had to get this virus, because I have an athlete experience, I’d get rid of it in a few days.
Uh?
[IN PORTUGUESE]
(To paraphrase President JAIR BOLSONARO) There’s something to worry about, and it’s anything that justifies the closure of the country.
And on the other hand, mayors and governors have said that scientists need to pay attention. We have to close businesses. We have to stay with other people at home. We’ll have to act now if we want to save lives. But it was literally difficult to enforce when the president sought to convince Brazilians that this was all a mistake and that they deserve not to pay attention to those local leaders.
So, in fact, it polarized Brazilian society. There were other people who are very firm with the pre-spect, who necessarily take their appearance and who feel empowered not to be quarantined, not to stay at home, so as not to give up their jobs. But on the other hand, there were many other people who despise the spectacle and who have cared a lot.
Then, at the end of March, everything amazing began to happen across the country in the big cities.
[BIG PROTESTERS IN OLLAS]
People were protesting by banging pots on their windows. It’s the only way for other people who took this virus seriously and were worried about making their voices heard. So every single night, like on wheels around 8:30 p.m., I can hear other people banging pots and howling with Bolsonaro from my window!
And it was an amazing sound. It seemed almost primitive. It was like the voices that passed through the night and voices expressing some kind of depression and anguish.
[BIG PROTESTERS IN OLLAS]
It is at this point that we began to see that a giant component of the country did not feel in the hands of Bolsonaro at the time of the crisis.
And this technique of the president, of Bolsonaro, missed you?
Well, I think we’ve learned not to be extraordinarily surprised by everything Bolsonaro does. As you may remember, he is a far-right populist leader who has sown discord since his election in 2018. But it was very unexpected for Brazil to keep its guard off guard in a physical health crisis of this magnitude. And the explanation is that the country, in the past, has faced the challenge of serious fitness disorders and has deployed its physically powerful and very complicated public fitness service to deal with complex disorders with cutting-edge solutions.
I’ll give you some examples. In the ’90s, when the first H.I.V. The drugs were on the market and allowed others to lead a healthy and productive life, these drugs were very expensive for others in poor countries. And Brazil has adopted a rather nonconformist technique in this. Brazil has necessarily challenged pharmaceutical corporations and said that we are a human rights factor and that other people deserve access to important drugs without having to fill out their wallet for years. So this argument was so powerful. This has led drug brands to make concessions, making these drugs less expensive and more available. And Brazil achieved a fairly significant victory globally by adopting a fairly ambitious position at the time.
More recently, Brazil has had to deal with the Zika crisis, which has led to the birth of young children with very, very difficult-to-manage malformations. And again, he threw away everything he had in terms of clinical experience. And one of the most attractive responses that Brazil has proposed is genetically modified mosquitoes. And the plan that by creating a genetically modified mosquito breed, they would prevent harmful types of mosquitoes from reproducing and, in doing so, remove Zika from the spaces where other people were spreading it.
Thus, in recent decades, Brazil has excelled as a major player in effectively addressing complex situations that demand fitness and meet the challenge, even for a country with great problems. You know, a lot of other people live in poverty. Many others do not have access to safe drinking water. But when it comes to saving lives, Brazil has shown itself acting with courage and determination.
But this year we saw it very differently.
We’ll be back.
So, Ernesto, why does the Brazilian leader necessarily take this approach to pandemic denial, especially despite Brazil’s long history of such competitive public aptitude crises?
Bolsonaro was chosen as a typical populist, who took the reins of a country that was recovering from a truly brutal economic recession and was just beginning to revive under his leadership. So I think for him and his assistants, the concept of an economic collapse in his watch, given the polarization of a figure, was simply ruinous. I think he thinks that if companies close and jobs disappear in gigantic numbers, his aid base would collapse. And I think another detail that might indicate Bolsonaro’s habit is that he’s someone who’s been looking for clues from President Trump on how they deserve to react to things.
Interesting.
And President Trump also adopted the technique that the virus was not so serious that it would disappear on its own. So, you know, a striking similarity in the way those two troubled leaders sell this crisis to their bases and to the wider audience listening to them.
Right. And in any case, and this is for Bolsonaro, a strong economy is the basis of its continuous strength, its leadership. And a strong economy and a very strong reaction to this pandemic are almost, by definition, incompatible. So, in your mind, is the greatest risk to your strength an economy that begins to stutter and stop, not a virus that can infect and start killing the Brazilian people?
That’s true, but there’s some other detail at play here. President Bolsonaro has been fueled by political scandals, almost since the beginning of his administration. And in recent months, he has begun to face legislative investigations and criminals who have questioned his ability to serve his term. One comes to an investigation into a money laundering plan involving one of his children. And the president is also being investigated through the Supreme Court for his efforts to replace police chiefs, which his former justice minister saw as an abuse of force and an effort for his circle of family members and allies of corruption investigations.
As the virus begins to take over the country, you sit with a president who is also in a politically precarious scenario and clings to your hopes for a strong economy, an economy that will not be destroyed. because he sees it as the key to his political survival.
In the face of all this, Ernesto, how do you play Bolsonaro here in the Brazilian public fitness system? What does it look like?
Well, you have this ordinary truth on a split screen. On the one hand, the Minister of Health is on television every night at press meetings:
(PORTUGUESE) There is nothing that further influences this reaction than Brazilian society will behave in the coming month or in a few days.
– preaching the merits of social estrangement, stating that quarantines are the only tool shown that we can release against this virus at this time, other people who can stay at home will have to stay at home, business closures make a lot of sense.
(IN PORTUGUESE) We want concentration, field and science.
So basically, I had a Health Minister who adhered to traditional wisdom and clinical consensus on what countries do.
(IN PORTUGUESE) So we can get out of this together.
On the other hand, you took the president out of the palace and joined the pro-government protests.
[APPLAUSE]
You shook his hand. In fact, he wasn’t wearing a mask at the time.
And the only thing he’s literally interested in as some kind of cure for the virus is hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, which goes so far as to order the military to mass-produce it, although there’s literally no clinical consensus that this is a good idea. And there are some signs that this may be harmful to patients with coronavirus. So it has become this unsustainable hole where other people asked the Minister of Health, how the hell do they deserve us to expect Brazilians to pay attention to what you ask them to do when they see their president take precisely the opposite approach?
And it reaches a break point in mid-April. The Health Minister, in the midst of a developing epidemic that is starting to spiral out of control, is fired.
Uh?
[IN PORTUGUESE]
You know, and on the way out, he handed over a rather scathing accusation about the president’s handling of this case. And he said, I stayed as long as I could just to go and get Brazil on a path of guilt, to see paintings outside my authorities, but I can no longer serve under this president because we are too far away. when it comes to our vision and our values about it.
Thank you very much and thank you very much to the Ministry of Health.
Thus, with the expulsion of the Prime Minister of Health, the President appoints a new minister who is a doctor, whose call was very little identified and who had never led a giant bureaucracy. Occasionally it looks like a deer in the headlights. The Brazilians began to laugh at him in online memes. He never felt he had traction or exposed a vision. And just before he finished a month’s work, he convenes a press convention and says:
(IN PORTUGUESE) Life is a choice and today I chose to leave. So tell me if I made my most productive this phase, this period.
(To paraphrase NELSON TEICH) That’s what I can do.
(IN PORTUGUESE) It’s easy to run a secretariat like this at such a complicated time.
He doesn’t give a transparent explanation for why he’s leaving, but it’s pretty transparent that he couldn’t live with the face of the president’s response either.
It’s an honor for me to be a part of it. Thank you.
Then it’s not going well. It goes through two fitness ministers in the middle of a fatal pandemic.
yes, and the numbers are on the rise.
Brazil now has the maximum instances of coronavirus in South America with more than 5800 cases shown of Covid-19 and increasing.
A new study conducted in the last two days seems that Brazil may have 8 times more cases recorded so far.
Brazil has officially reported on 4,500 deaths. It is idea that the number is much higher, due to the lack of evidence.
More than 90,000 and more than 6,000 people were killed.
100,000 with more than 7,000 dead.
Brazil now has more coronavirus deaths than China.
You know, in this …
Well, like the number of coronavirus cases in Brazil, so does the risk to communities in the Amazon region.
– start to see a genuine tension in some states.
The city, Manaus, has already noticed the collapse of its fitness formula.
In the Amazon, for example, gravediggers dug mass graves because other people were dying so fast that the culprits were absolutely beaten in hospitals and funeral homes.
In Rio de Janeiro, many men, women and young people covered the property for food and water.
So –
Health across the country is struggling.
– you know, in some cities across the country, panic is starting to settle.
But experts don’t expect Brazil to succeed at its peak for a few more weeks.
And nationally, the Department of Health has no minister. And instead of appointing other experts in the field, the president leaves the branch in the hands of an active-duty army general who was a logistics expert but had no genuine medical experience. And one of the first things the branch does when it’s necessarily run by this army general is to approve this antimalaric pill, hydroxychloroquine, and say that fitness professionals across the country give it to all coronavirus patients who need it at any time. Contagion.
On his third attempt, however, he found a Health Minister willing to hold that position.
Absolutely. And I had one at work, and I had to take orders from the president.
And Bolsonaro as the number of infections increased, while the death toll increased? Or did he get the same technique as at first?
There were times when he identified that it was a very vital challenge and that it was a crisis, but it was very consistent in saying that it is to save the economy and put the economic recovery before the opposite combat of the virus.
At one point, when there had been some kind of milestone in the death toll, someone asked him outside the palace what he thought of him, and he said, so what? What do you need me to do? My call would possibly be the Messiah, who refers to his middle call, but I’m not here to paint miracles. Earlier this month, Bolsonaro said, I’m sorry for the loss of life. But at the end of the day, it’s everyone’s destiny.
Everybody ends up dying, that’s what he says.
Yes. So he didn’t really back down. And I think in the long run, what some political experts think is that he is betting on the option that when the real economic pain comes — six months, a year later, when it becomes clear how hard Brazilians are hit–, Brazilians can eliminate their anger with the governors and mayors who imposed Array’s quarantines and that the president can simply forge a role as someone who has at all times sought to save jobs, sought to keep the economy on track. And I think it’s too early to tell. As a political strategy, this can pay off on the road.
Ernesto, I am curious if you think that, given Brazil’s history of fighting the crises of public aptitude, under another leadership, a president like Bolsonaro, who is skeptical of science and who explicitly puts the economy in public aptitude, Brazil would be a very different position right now?
Well, I think it’s valuable what other countries in the region have done. And there are cases where governments have had very decisive and considered answers that struggle with very high numbers. So, there is something mysterious in the places where this virus moves an angry way, even in the face of a decisive and complicated response.
I think that a non-unusual issue that we see and that actually applies in Brazil is that countries with very marked inequalities have had more difficulty in making the virus spread. There are many Brazilians who live in poor and abundant communities where other people pile up, where many families live in a small house. And this virus has underlined the privilege of some Brazilians to adhere to traditional rules of social estrangement and to what extent, for many Brazilians, for millions of them, this is simply not a possibility.
But there is no doubt that Brazil had the experience, had shown itself to respond to the demanding situations of physical attention in a decisive way. And he never really solved a coherent or complicated response. He was bogged down in this political struggle that prevented him from having a plan that made sense to people, a plan he could for his people.
In the end, without a transparent national policy, no political consensus and no effective enforcement mechanisms for some of these quarantines and blockades, there is no brake on the virus.
But almost everyone I’ve spoken to and who has spent years working on the fitness policy picture in Brazil has said that we are supplied and in a position and able to take on the challenge. There were so many things we could have done in the valuable early days of the epidemic to retaliate, prepare, and save lives.
Ernesto, thank you very much. We’re that.
It’s a pleasure, Michael.
On Wednesday, the number of contagions in Brazil rose to 1.4 million and the death toll exceeded 60,000, confirming that brazil’s epidemic is the worst in the world, after the United States. We’ll be right back.
Here’s what you want to know today.
So I need to be very clear, we can’t move forward right now with the food in the room in New York. Look, even a week ago, honestly, I hope we could. But the news we’ve gained from all over the country continues to get worse.
As infections in the United States continue to break records, New York City has a delayed plan to resume meals indoors, Miami Beach has restored a curfew to prevent citizens from collecting at night, and California has closed indoor bars and restaurants in 19 counties. . At a news convention Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he knew the resolution would be disappointing.
And I deeply respect people’s freedom, their preference to be back to the way they were. But I can’t impress you anymore, our movements have an effect on others.
On Wednesday night, the death toll in the United States due to the virus approached 128,000.
[PROTESTERS IN HONG KONG]
A new national security law, imposed in Hong Kong through China, was tested Wednesday when thousands of procheckers took to the streets for greater freedom and independence from China.
The law, which came into force on Tuesday, prohibits a wide variety of activities, adding slogans and carrying banners that China considers seditious. Sometimes, in mentioning the new law, police arrested about 370 people, adding a 15-year-old woman waving a flag, calling for Hong Kong’s independence.
“The Daily” is directed by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vander Ploeg, Adizah Eghan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu , Sayre Quevedo, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Rachelle Bonja. Our theme song is Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk from Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller and Lis Moriconi.
That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbaro. See you Monday after the holidays.
The country’s reaction to the crisis has been widely criticized inside and outside the country. Bolsonaro ignored the danger posed by the virus, sabotaged quarantine measures at the state level, and asked Brazilians to keep running to prevent the economy from collapsing.
So far, two states, Amazonas and Maranhao, have allowed schools to reopen, but basically personal schools, which serve less than 20% of the state’s children. Nine states and the capital have announced plans to reopen at least some schools between August and October.
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