Brasilia, Brazil.
With death records, hospitals on the verge of collapse and a slow-motion vaccination campaign, Brazil is experiencing the deadliest phase of the coronavirus pandemic without a national strategy to contain it.
The South American giant recorded 1,641 coronavirus deaths on Tuesday and 1,910 on Wednesday, two consecutive records since the first case reported in February 2020. The total number of victims of the disease is close to 260,000, a record surpassed by the United States alone, and the 10, 7 million infections.
“For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, there is a simultaneous aggravation of several indicators across the country,” the prestigious Fiocruz Foundation of the Ministry of Health said this week.
This is a “Alarming scenario” with an increase in cases and deaths, high levels of severe acute respiratory syndromes (SRAG) and an occupancy of more than 80% of beds in intensive care units (ICU) in 19 of the 27 Brazilian states, the institution explained .
Read: Five countries agree to accelerated approval of vaccines against covid-19 variants
In the last seven days the average has been 1,331 deaths a day, a figure that until February remained close to 1,100. Since January, the country has failed to drop below 1,000 deaths a day, as happened between June and August last year, during the first wave.
The number of victims shows that traffic restrictions ordered in recent weeks by mayors and governors – and criticized by President Jair Bolsonaro – have been insufficient to curb the pandemic.
The worrying rise is due, according to experts, to the lack of social distancing during the New Year holidays and the crowds of the southern summer and Carnival, although the latter were formally banned.
Some studies also point to the new variant of coronavirus from the Amazon, called P.1, twice as contagious, already detected in 17 states and causing global alarm.
“The tip of the iceberg”
Brazil, a country of 212 million people, has been slowly vaccinated against covid for a month and a half, due to a lack of dose: so far, 7.4 million Brazilians have been vaccinated and only 2.3 million of them with the second dose.
This emergency “is not a surprise: it must have been unprepared, because this scenario was planned. We knew there was a new variant and there had to be a lockdown,” the vice-president of the AFP told AFP. Brazilian Society of Immunology (SBIM), Isabella Ballalai.
The richest and most populous state of Sao Paulo will return on Saturday, for two weeks, to the “red phase” of restrictions, which allows the operation of health services, food, public transport and schools, but prohibits the opening of shopping malls, restaurants and performance halls.
too: “Law of Dream and Promise” arrives in the United States Congress
“Today we are in Sao Paulo and Brazil on the verge of a health collapse,” warned São Paulo Governor Joao Doria on Wednesday, in the state a patient with covid is hospitalized every two minutes.
In Brasília and in the states of Mato Grosso, Pernambuco, Rondonia and Acre, among more than a dozen, the activity was already reduced to essential services or limited opening hours of shops, with possible curfews nocturnes.
Even the richest and most infrastructure-rich states like Paraná and Santa Catarina (south) are on “critical alert” for UCI bed occupancy.
Fiocruz warned, however, that the current scenario “represents only the tip of the iceberg of an intense transmission level” of the coronavirus.
self-management
The emergency and lack of coordination by the federal government pushed mayors and governors to articulate on their own to buy vaccines.
State health secretaries on Monday called for implementing a nationwide night curfew and a “lockdown” in the most critical areas.
But this stance clashes with that of Bolsonaro, who promotes crowds with his followers, questions the use of masks and the effectiveness of vaccines and criticizes the authorities who apply measures of social isolation for their economic impact.
Now, the country is simultaneously facing a worsening pandemic and a new and sharp slowdown in its economy.
The far-right president, with his eyes set on the 2022 election, said last week that governors who decree closures of activities “will have to pay” with their own budgets economic aid to the poorest population.
“This discrepancy between the federal and the state has been one of the big problems, with a lot of politicization of the issue, and this has certainly made the country one of the worst pandemic management sites,” Ballalai said.