RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) – Brazil currently accounts for a quarter of the world’s daily COVID-19 deaths, far more than any other nation, and health experts warn the nation is on the verge of an even greater calamity. great.
The seven-day national average of 2,400 deaths it will reach 3,000 in a few weeks, six experts told the Associated Press. This is almost the worst level seen by the US, although Brazil has two-thirds of its population. Daily peak deaths could soon reach 4,000; on Friday there were 3,650.
After glimpses the abyss, there is a growing recognition that stoppages can no longer be avoided, not only among experts, but also among many mayors and governors. The restrictions on activity they implemented last year were half-baked and constantly sabotaged by President Jair Bolsonaro, who tried to avert economic hardship. He is not convinced of any need for braking, which leaves local leaders pursuing a package of measures to prevent the death toll from rising further.
It may be too late, with a more contagious variant crossing Brazil. For the first time, new daily cases exceeded 100,000 on March 25, with many more not counting. Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University who advised several Brazilian governors and mayors on pandemic control, predicts that the total death toll will reach 500,000 in July and exceed that of the United States by the end of year.
“We have surpassed unprecedented levels for a country with a public health system, with a history of efficient immunization campaigns and unsurpassed health workers in the world,” Nicolelis said. “The next stage is the collapse of the health care system.”
The system is already flowing, with almost all intensive care units in the states nearby or within their capacity. Dr. José Antônio Curiati, supervisor of the Hospital das Clinicas in Sao Paulo, the largest hospital complex in Latin America, said the beds are full, but patients continue to arrive. The city’s oxygen supply is not guaranteed and stocks of sedatives needed for intubation in intensive care units will soon be depleted.
“Four thousand deaths a day seem to be just around the corner,” Curiati said.
On March 17, in the northeastern state of Piaui, nurse Polyena Silveira cried next to a COVID-19 patient who died on the floor from lack of beds in her public hospital. A photo capturing the moment went viral and served as a national wake-up call.
“When he was gone, he had two minutes to feel sorry before moving on to the next patient,” Silveira, 33, told the AP. “In eight years as a nurse, I had never felt so much pain as that night. I am close to the limit, physically and mentally ”.
Brazil’s state institute of science and technology Fiocruz on Tuesday called for a 14-day shutdown to reduce transmission by 40 percent. Natalia Pasternak, a microbiologist who chairs the Institute of the Question of Science, pointed to a local example of success: the middle city of Araraquara, in the state of Sao Paulo, last month implemented a blockade and has seen as their cases and deaths decrease.
Pasternak declined to estimate Brazil’s approaching daily figure, but said the trend is continued growth if nothing is done.
“We need coordinated action, and that probably won’t happen because the federal government has no real interest in taking preventative action,” Pasternak said. “(Mayors and governors) try to apply preventive measures, but separately and in their own way. This is not the best approach, but it is better than nothing.
Minas Gerais, the second most populous state in Brazil, has closed non-essential stores. The state of the Holy Spirit will go into blockade on Sunday. Brazil’s two largest cities, Rio and Sao Paulo, have imposed extensive restrictions on non-essential activities. His state authorities advanced vacations to create a 10-day rest period, which began Friday.
However, restrictive measures are only as strong as citizen compliance. And Bolsonaro continues to undermine his will by painting even a partial closure as an assault on the right to earn an honest salary. He has attacked local leaders, especially governors, who dare to challenge him.
“We need to open our eyes and understand that this is no joke,” Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes said in a message recorded on the eve of the 10-day closing, stressing that no mayor wants to cause unemployment. “People die and if everything goes as it is, nothing is done, God only knows what could happen. No one knows the extent of this disease. Nobody knows how many variants could emerge. “
Hundreds of protesters marched on Copacabana Beach in Rio the next morning. Most of the green and yellow T-shirts that wore the badge of pro-Bolsonaro rallies and that many did not want to wear masks. They sang “We want to work!” and vitriol directed to Paes.
The director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on Monday called on everyone in Brazil to give a serious answer: “either the government or the people.”
“It is a concerted effort by all actors that will really reverse this upward trend. It’s really very fast and it accelerates very, very fast, ”he said. “We’re mostly concerned about the (weekly) mortality rate, which doubled in just one month, from 7,000 to 15,000.”
The spread of the virus has been turbocharged by the more contagious P.1 variant that has become a cause for concern beyond Brazil’s borders, not just in South America. This week has already been identified in the United States in New York. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said Wednesday that his team will meet with Brazilian authorities and are “quite concerned” about the situation in Brazil.
The United States has seen its death toll drop since late January amid a massive vaccine rollout, and its seven-day average has fallen below 1,000. By contrast, the deployment of vaccines in Brazil has been reduced, at best. The government relied heavily on a single supplier of vaccines, AstraZeneca, while rejecting offers for months to buy others. Only after delays in the delivery of AstraZeneca jeopardized deployment, Brazil’s health ministry began buying, but it’s too late for most deliveries to arrive in the first half of this year.
The nation has completely vaccinated less than 2% of its citizens, which experts widely consider a disgrace to a country long considered a global model of vaccination programs.
This week, more than 500 of the country’s most influential economists and executives have written an open letter calling for mass vaccination and denigrating the situation. They said the controversy over the economic impacts of social distancing is a false dilemma and that all levels of government should be prepared to implement an emergency closure.
While the Brazilian economy didn’t shrink as much as regional countries last year, the worsening health crisis overshadows 2021, according to William Jackson, chief economist of emerging markets at Capital Economics. GDP will return to pre-crisis levels later this year, at the earliest, marking a rather weak recovery relative to other emerging markets.
Monica de Bolle, a Brazilian senior researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, is more pessimistic and expects a new recession in 2021. The poor state of affairs in the coming months depends on whether the P.1 variant is already dominant in all over the country, and is shown to cause reinfections or to be more severe.
Either way, there is no time left to delay decisive action, he said.
“All in all, it’s a huge disaster,” said de Bolle, who has done graduate studies in immunology and genetics. “It could have been avoided; it was not. It is now very difficult to fix. The only real solution is a very hard block with the population that really accepts it, which can mean a hard sale ”.
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Savarese reported from Sao Paulo. AP journalist Marcelo de Sousa and video journalist Mario Lobão contributed from Rio.