Brazil’s Death Toll Increases 50 Percent in One Week

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Since the first death by coronavirus was recorded, Brazil has taken 53 days to pass the 10,000 victim mark, which occurred on May 9th. But it took only a week to exceed 15,000 deaths. On Saturday, the country reached 15,633 victims, and 233,142 confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to the Ministry of Health. There were 816 new deaths recorded in 24 hours and 14,919 new cases.

In São Paulo alone, 4,688 people died as a result of the infection, and the state has already passed the number of victims in China (4,637), where the pandemic began in December. In terms of the number of cases, Brazil has passed Italy and Spain and is now the 4th in the world. According to Johns Hopkins University, Italy records 223,885 cases and Spain 230,698.

The epidemic curve is rapidly growing in Brazil, exponentially, as the government of President Jair Bolsonaro increases pressure to reduce isolation measures, one day after Nelson Teich resigned from the Ministry of Health. According to experts, the country should be moving in the opposite direction, enforcing a lockdown, at the risk of witnessing a tragedy.

“At this rate, on May 20th, we should exceed 20,000 deaths. This wouldn’t be the case if we were taking more appropriate containment measures. But if the President can undo the restrictions that municipalities and states are adopting, we’ll see these numbers grow even faster,” says Domingos Alves, a physicist at USP Ribeirão Preto University.

The researcher is part of the Covid-19 Brazil group, a task force of scientists from more than ten Brazilian universities that has been monitoring cases and producing growth forecasts using data science techniques since the start of the epidemic in the country. The growth rate is estimated to become five times faster than the current one should milder isolation be implemented, as proposed by Bolsonaro.

According to the group’s calculations, if municipalities with over 80 percent occupancy of ICU beds implement lockdown, and those with between 60 and 80 percent occupancy enforce more restrictive measures, with over 70 percent of the population in isolation, the number of deaths should start to decline between late July and early August. “But we’ll already have something like 80,000 deaths,” Alves estimates.

According to experts, the country has not yet reached the peak, but the current growth rate is a cause for concern: “The epidemic doesn’t work like geographical accidents where there are mountains with well-defined peaks. We’ll know when it’s passed. We’re on an upward curve of almost a thousand deaths a day with a high probability of coming close to the deaths of European countries in 15 days,” says Paulo Lotufo, an epidemiologist at USP (University of São Paulo).

Source: Estadão