Brazil ends March with 66,000 dead, deadliest month in pandemic | Society

Brazil closes March as the deadliest month due to covid-19 since the start of the epidemic: 66,000 deaths and a week in which the daily death record has been broken several times. Despite the escalation of the pandemic in the country and the collapse of the health system in all regions, Jair Bolsonaro’s government is not considering the possibility of a national lockdown.

Quarantine has been advocated for months by epidemiologists as the only way to curb short-term infections and minimize hospital pressure. Countries in a much less serious situation than Brazil, such as France, have once again adopted severe restrictions on the movement of their populations. Bolsonaro even belatedly adopted the defense of mass vaccination (still with no prospect of being reached), but does not offer immediate solutions to prevent deaths and minimize the chaos installed in hospitals.

Thousands of people are lining up for a hospital bed, lacking intubation medicine and oxygen. Meanwhile, the government and Congress are preparing a big change to expand private sector participation in covid-19 vaccination, an initiative criticized by experts. “We are a few weeks away from a point of no return in the coronavirus crisis in Brazil,” said Miguel Nicolelis, neuroscientist and professor at Duke University (USA), in his column at EL PAÍS Brasil. Nicolelis estimates that the country will soon be able to add between 4,000 and 5,000 daily deaths from covid-19. And he projects a catastrophic scenario for July, with Brazil reaching a total of 500,000 pandemic victims.

Nicolelis fears that in addition to the healthcare system, funeral services will also collapse, if the call for a nationwide lockdown is not heeded, with non-essential traffic blockages at airports and highways. In the country’s most populous capital, São Paulo, cemeteries have started operating at night to meet the demand for burials. “If the funeral collapse happens in this country, we will start to see corpses left on the streets, in open spaces. We will have to use the terrible resource of using mass graves to bury hundreds of people simultaneously, without funeral urns, only in plastic bags, which will speed up the process of contaminating the soil, groundwater, food, and so on. with this will generate a series of other very serious bacterial epidemics, ”he explains. Despite this, the federal government continues to reject national restrictive measures.

On the same day that Brazil has recorded the highest number of deaths since the start of the pandemic so far, President Jair Bolsonaro again criticized social isolation and called on governors to withdraw restrictive measures they have adopted, with curfews and curfews. “We only have one way: let people work. The side effects of the fight against the pandemic cannot be more damaging than the virus itself, ”he declared, without a mask, announcing the return of reduced emergency aid.

A few minutes earlier, his Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, and the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, Arthur Lira and Rodrigo Pacheco, had defended social distancing and the use of face masks as a preventive measure, but without discuss the need for measures. restrictive. “There is a discussion starting in Congress that must be transparent, which is the possibility that the private sector also buys vaccines, so that the entrepreneur can vaccinate his employees and their families, to maintain his business, his business, of foot, ”Lira defended.

Permission to purchase vaccines by the private sector has been criticized by experts, arguing that it is the function of the public health system to distribute doses evenly across the country. Private sector revenues will only be adequate, they say, when most of the priority groups, the most vulnerable to COVID-19, are vaccinated. Lira, however, says she sees no conflict of interest. “Basically, we are in war and at war, everything is used to save lives. (…) Any vaccinated Brazilian is one less in the viral statistics ”.

Despite policy measures aimed at breaking private sector ties in vaccine procurement, entrepreneurs are unlikely to be able to make purchases anytime soon, as the world faces a global drug race and most pharmaceutical companies claim that at present, they sell doses only for the government.

The Brazilian government itself, which says it has already contracted more than 560 million doses, has struggled with the delivery schedule. So far, only 6.2% of this quantity has been distributed to States and the arrival of new batches is still fraught with uncertainty, either due to production delays or import difficulties. Minister Marcelo Queiroga said his goal was to vaccinate one million people per day in April, half the rate he himself estimates the PNI (National Vaccination Plan) is capable of achieving, if it there were enough vaccines.

No mass vaccination or confinement nationally, Brazil continues a chaotic escalation in health units and breaks successive records of daily deaths due to covid-19. People are dying in lines for intensive care beds, and healthcare facilities are running with insufficient and exhausted medical supplies. The structure, the drugs and even the oxygen are lacking. The Minister of Health admits that the national park does not meet the current demand for supply and claims to negotiate the import of drugs, while studying the diversion of industrial production of oxygen to hospitals with companies.

Queiroga repeated that science will follow and even ask for the cooperation of the population to wear masks and avoid “unnecessary crowds”, but he does not contradict Bolsonaro on the confinement either. “The population must adhere to this social distance, but it is not with the law,” he said.

Last Wednesday, Queiroga was questioned during a public hearing in the Chamber of Deputies on what he intended to do to save the young people, who occupy intensive care beds in hospitals at this stage of the health crisis and are still far from entering the queue. of those who can already be vaccinated given the lack of available doses. “The solution for young people is to have vaccines. We are looking for vaccines very hard, ”he replied, acknowledging the difficulty of getting short-term deliveries.

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