RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – March has been by far the worst month of the pandemic in Brazil, with more than 66,000 fatalities. On Tuesday, March 30, 3,780 deaths were recorded, bringing the total to 321,515.
The President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has criticized the measures that seek to restrict the population’s movement in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and has assured people that “hunger kills much more than the virus itself.”
Bolsonaro expressed his point of view in an appearance before journalists, without taking questions. “Brazil has to get back to work. The population has to go back to work,” said Bolsonaro, who appeared before the microphones without a mask, accompanied by other senior officials who did have their faces partially covered.
“The collateral effects of the pandemic cannot be more than those of the virus itself,” Bolsonaro insisted.
São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are under an extended holiday period ordered by municipal authorities that began on Friday and will last until this Sunday to restrict the population’s activities.
From March 1 to March 31, 66,573 Covid-19 fatalities were recorded, more than double the 32,881 in July 2020, the previous deadliest month.
In the last 24 hours, 90,638 new infected cases were also registered, according to the report published by the Brazilian National Council of Health Secretaries (Conass) on Wednesday, March 31.
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After the United States, Brazil is the country with the second-highest cumulative number of Covid-19 cases, with 12.6 million infected, and deaths, 321,515, according to the latest data from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).
Bolsonaro said that orders from state and municipal authorities seeking to ask the population to stay at home “create a de facto state of siege”, a special measure that only the legislative branch can authorize.
“Staying at home is not going to solve this problem,” stressed Bolsonaro, who at the beginning of the pandemic downplayed its importance and went so far as to describe Covid-19 as a “little flu.”
March 21-27 was also the week with the highest number of cases (almost 540,000), which means that more people will probably need to be hospitalized in two weeks. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 12,748,747 people have been infected in this country of 212 million inhabitants.
“Never in the history of Brazil has a single event caused so many deaths in thirty days”, said to AFP physician Miguel Nicolelis, former coordinator of the Scientific Committee formed by Brazil’s northeastern states to face the pandemic. “We are at the worst moment, with the highest number of deaths and cases, which indicates that April will still be awful,” said epidemiologist Ethel Maciel, a professor at the Federal University of Espirito Santo (UFES).
But hospitals are already saturated: 18 of the 27 Brazilian states have more than 90% of their intensive care unit (ICU) beds for Covid-19 occupied, and seven others have an occupancy rate of 84% to 89%, according to the latest bulletin of the Fiocruz Foundation.
Several states began adopting protocols to allocate available beds to patients with the best chance of survival. “We have reached a very tragic situation, similar to what happened in Italy” early last year, Maciel said.
According to a report by TV Globo, at least 230 people with Covid-19 or suspected of having the virus died in March while waiting for an ICU bed in the metropolitan region of São Paulo.
The fear increases with the approaching southern winter when there is greater demand for hospitalizations due to other respiratory diseases. “We may have a confluence of these demands with very high rates of Covid, causing a perfect storm” in the health system, Nicolelis said. “The pandemic is totally out of control, and the possibility of reaching 4,000 deaths per day is genuine as of this week. And, the prospect of reaching half a million deaths by July is already plausible,” he added.
Source: infobae