This won’t be a long diary. But I’ve been tracking the coronavirus caseloads since this whole thing started. I’ve gone through the fear of catching and dying from it, and especially passing the virus on to my husband, who both has chronic kidney disease (CKD, Stage 4) and is taking immune-suppressing drugs. Not helping: early research has shown there is a 530% increase of mortality for those hospitalized with preexisting CKD.
My husband and I have been infuriated by the Trump followers, white supremacists, and those saying and doing nothing to correct the evil being spewed on our country. The lack of any consideration for those of us in a high-risk situation, or love someone who is, have no shred of humanity left ….. and I condemn whomever or whatever it is that has made them this way.
Now that I have that off my chest, let’s see how Trumpian public health policy has been playing out under President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro.
Time Wasted
Bolsonaro had plenty of time to prepare the Brazilian health infrastructure for the pandemic. The first case of SARS-2 was announced on 26 February. Around 5 March, the Brazil Health Ministry announced plans to add thousands of hospital beds, doctors, ventilators, and PPE, prompted by community spread over 10 days. again in Sao Paulo.
An additional 291 cases were detected by the time the first Brazilian death was reported on 17 March, in Sao Paulo. But Bolsonaro continued his Trumpian stylings, stating in a CNN interview that taking actions such as banning mass events, such as futbol, amounted to ‘hysteria’. “Banning this and that isn’t going to contain the spread,” he said in the same interview after appearing at a rally of supporters earlier in the day. Initially, he had urged supporters to cancel the event because of the pandemic.
Such mixed messages were (and continue to be) endemic in Brazil, just like in the U.S., with confusion the result. Also typically Trumpian was Bolsonaro’s statement:
"The economy was going well," he said. "This virus brought a certain hysteria and some governors, in my view, I could be wrong, are adopting measures that could hurt our economy a lot."
Remember Operation: Blame China?? Beijing “will do anything they can” to make him lose his re-election bid in November. Mr. Trump said a version of this again today, 29 May, at an afternoon presser.
Death Tolls, Risky Behaviors, and Passing the Buck
Bolsonaro was caught boosting choloroquine as a cure for COVID-19. He criticized state and local governments for putting in place strict quarantine and shelter-in-place measures, claiming they will unnecessarily hurt the economy. He tweeted videos of himself shopping in Brasilia and encouraging continued work, which Twitter subsequently removed. Even as the death toll surpassed 1,000 on 10 April, Bolsonaro went maskless at a bakery, defying social distancing rules by hugging supporters and posing with them in selfies. In April and May, he also went through two health ministers, as science continued to lose to right wing politics. As the death toll passed 5,000 on 29 April, the President appeared to just give up during a Q and A with reporters: “So what? I’m sorry, but what do you want me to do?” Subsequently, the toll doubled on 9 May, tripled from the 29 April figure by 16 May, and quadrupled to 20,000 on 21 May.
Follow the Leader …. Oh, Wait!
Early in the pandemic, over 60% of Sao Paulo residents followed the shelter-in-place guidelines according to city officials. That figure now has sunk to less than 50%, even with tens of thousands of new cases every day. Much of this has been attributed to Bolsonaro’s bad example: going without masks in public, running unproven cures to his supporters, and daring them to break lockdown restrictions through social media. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the daily case additions look like they do in the graphic below:
A similar phenomenon has been seen in Russia under Putin. So, the lesson is that authoritarianism is bad for your health, I suppose.
Seasonality: Does it exist for SARS-2?
Will COVID-19 wane in the heat and humidity of summer, as the flu does? From the look of that graphic above, it surely doesn’t seem likely. In fact, some of the largest outbreaks have been in the warm, moist depths of the Amazon rain forest. The capital of Amazonas state, Manaus, has been especially hard hit. Unless there are favorable indoor environments that increase the risk of transmission in Brazil, it seems unlikely that SARS-2 will be significantly reduced unless it mutates and becomes more sensitive to heat and moisture.
This is consistent with some recent research done in Canada in an attempt to verify an earlier conclusion that there was significant reduction related to temperature or latitude. The more recent research showed little to no relationship between spread of SARS-2 and these two variables.