Covid-19 Pulls 1.4 Million Out of Work in Brazil Due to Illness

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – When Alcides da Silva, 52, began to feel pain and high temperature, he was desperate. Three neighbors in Guaianazes, a suburb of São Paulo, had died after contracting the novel coronavirus and, overnight, the burden of unemployment he had been carrying for over a year added to his fear of the coronavirus.

“Imagine seeing bills coming in and not being able to look for work. It’s like looking around and not finding a way out.”

The janitor saw his chances of returning to work become even slimmer when his first Covid-19 test came back inconclusive. He must remain in isolation and take medication.

“My routine became going to the doctor. And when you get to a certain age, it gets harder and harder to work. I received two basic food baskets from a movement. Everybody helps each other, but the next day is worrying.”

Silva is part of a contingent which has greatly grown with the spread of Covid-19: those who have become unavailable to work, mainly because they have become ill or have had to take care of someone who is sick.

According to a survey by Marcel Balassiano, a researcher at IBRE/FGV (Brazilian Institute of Economics), based on data from the Continuous PNAD (Continuous National Household Sample Survey), the number of unemployed Brazilians who were prevented from seeking work because of personal issues – particularly because they were sick – increased from 3.3 million in the quarter up to February to 4.7 million by April. There are some 1.4 million people, an increase of 45 percent.

This increase is much higher than the number of discouraged people, those who stopped looking for work because they felt they would not find a new position, which increased seven percent over the same period. The number includes people who were unavailable due to studies or women who became pregnant. But the significant increase shows that health was the item that weighed most heavily on the increase.

Balassiano believes that this situation could deteriorate even further: “The country was already in a very poor situation, which the novel coronavirus only aggravated. Public debt stands at 90 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while efforts are being made to find ways out of the health crisis. The labor market tends to deteriorate,” he says.

In May, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) conducted a specific survey, the PNAD Covid-19, in partnership with the Ministry of Health. Given that the samples and periods are different, it is impossible to compare the PNAD Covid with the Continuous PNAD, but the May numbers disclose details of the pandemic’s impacts.

They show that 25.7 million people were out of the labor force but would like to work. In addition, 17.7 million workers were unable to seek employment because of the pandemic or could not find a job in the region where they live.

Source: O Estado de S. Paulo