Brazil’s COVID-19 Death Toll Surpasses 180,000

Brazil passed the grim milestone of 180,000 Covid-19 deaths on Friday, as experts warned the country was going through the second wave of infections amid President Jair Bolsonaro's insistence that the epidemic was at the "tail end."

The Brazilian Ministry of Health has recorded 672 new deaths for a total of 180,437 since the onset of the pandemic, making the South American nation the second to surpass the threshold after the United States, reports AFP.

Curves for both infections and deaths in Brazil now show strong signs of an upward trend, dropping somewhat from late August to early November.

Bolsonaro attracted fire from his critics this week for his new remarks on the health crisis.

“We’re at the tail end of the pandemic. Compared to other countries in the world, our government was the best, or one of the best, in handling it,” the far-right leader said Thursday.

Health experts disagreed.

“The president is wrong. I don’t know where he got that idea, but no indicator shows that” the end is near, said Christovam Barcellos, a researcher at Brazil’s leading public-health research center, Fiocruz.

In reality, infections are also rising sharply. They reached the 54,000 mark on Friday, for a total of 6.8 million since the start of the pandemic.

Barcellos warned that with the holiday season and the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the situation could get worse.

“There will be more people circulating, without control measures and with many of our social distancing policies now dismantled,” he told AFP.

Bolsonaro has been at odds with health experts on how to respond to the pandemic since 212 million people arrived in the country with the first reported outbreak on 26 February.

He downplayed the current coronavirus as a little flu," denounced the "hysteria surrounding it and forced Covid-19 to use the medication hydroxychloroquine, despite a number of studies showing that it was ineffective.

– Warning signs –

Brazil, which experienced a horrific plateau of more than 1,000 Covid-19 deaths a day from June to August, managed to decrease its average daily death toll to around 300 last month.

However, the number grew again in excess of 800 this week before going back to 639 Fridays.

Intensive care units in seven of Brazil's 27 state capitals are now more than 90% complete, and the field hospitals that complemented them earlier in the year have been demolished.

Preparations for an eventual vaccination drive were caught in a political battle between Bolsonaro and the probable opponent of the 2022 presidential election, Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria.

Bolsonaro confidently said that he did not plan to have himself vaccinated.

Doria is pressing hard to start a vaccination campaign on January 25—with the President's objection—with the use of the Chinese-developed CoronaVac vaccine, which Sao Paulo is helping to research and manufacture.

Meanwhile, Brazil has increasingly relaxed its home-stay steps to combat the virus, which were only partially enforced, beginning with the Bolsonaro-state and local authorities in the midst of the tug-of-war on how to respond.

Despite the promise of a vaccine at some point in 2021, “we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, with a highly contagious virus that is killing the most vulnerable people,” said researcher Jose David Urbaez of the Brazilian Society of Infectious Disease Specialists.

“People need to protect themselves and not go out and party for the holidays.”