Rio De Janeiro
Brazil reported the highest daily Covid-19 death toll in the world Tuesday with 1,039 people killed, the fifth straight day the country has topped the list.
Latin America’s largest country, which has emerged as a new epicenter in the coronavirus pandemic, has seen its daily death toll surge past that of the United States, the hardest-hit country so far.
The US recorded a death toll of 657 in the past 24 hours, said the Johns Hopkins University tracker. That was the third day in a row it had come in under 700, bringing the country’s overall toll to 98,875 deaths.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s daily death toll has passed 1,000 four times since the pandemic accelerated in the country a week ago.
Brazil has now confirmed a total of 24,512 deaths, according to health ministry figures. Experts say under-testing means the real number is probably much higher.
With a population of 210 million people, Brazil has recorded 391,222 infections, second only to the US, which has confirmed more than 1.68 million.
Brazil is torn over how to respond to the pandemic. Far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed the virus and railed against stay-at-home measures, arguing the economic fallout risks causing more damage than the virus itself.
But most state governments have stuck to the World Health Organization’s guidance and closed non-essential businesses.
Bolsonaro has meanwhile pinned his hopes on the medication hydroxychloroquine, which — like US President Donald Trump — he has touted as a potential wonder drug against Covid-19.
Brazil’s health ministry recommends doctors in the public health system prescribe hydroxychloroquine or a related drug, chloroquine, from the onset of Covid-19 symptoms.
It said Monday it stood by that guideline, despite the WHO ending clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine over concerns about its safety and effectiveness against the coronavirus.
Brazil’s other potential hotspots were its dense pockets of poverty ¯ the informal favelas of cities like Rio de Janeiro and the suburban periphery neighbourhoods of São Paulo and other metropolitan regions. Long victims of government neglect and stigma, many of those communities lack access to basic sanitation and health care, which, along with their small and tightly packed houses, leave them vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks.
But favela residents have seen little help from the government as the pandemic worsens. “The word ‘favela’ has not been heard from any government official,” Gilson Rodrigues, a favela leader in São Paulo, said in a Facebook Live broadcast in March, Americas Quarterly reported. “We need to organize and protect ourselves.”
Favela residents across Brazil have organized to manufacture their own hand sanitizer, monitor residents’ health, and create news apps to combat the spread of misinformation about the virus.
But the government’s response, at least in some parts of the country, has been to continue ramping up a deadly drug war.
If you don’t contain the spread of the virus, then it doesn’t matter what economic measures you useAnya Prusa, Woodrow Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute
In Rio de Janeiro, where Gov. Wilson Witzel, like Bolsonaro, is a supporter of hard-line public security tactics, police have continued to stage raids into favela neighbourhoods to root out the drug gangs that operate within them. Rio’s police, who are among the deadliest in the world and regularly wield extrajudicial force, killed at least 10 people in one such operation this week, according to community activists. During a Tuesday operation, police shot and killed a 14-year-old boy.
“The world needs to know what is happening in Rio de Janeiro. The state of Rio de Janeiro, governed by [Witzel], is using pandemic isolation as a strategy for violent police actions,” Raull Santiago, a community activist in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão favela, tweeted Tuesday. “The [World Health Organization] says that to beat the coronavirus, we need to do social isolation. But police have been carrying out violent operations in the slums and putting us at risk of violent death.”
The operations have also drawn out crowds of angry and scared residents who oppose the tactics of a police force that killed nearly five people per day a year ago.
“In Brazil, the pandemic brought deaths, thirst, hunger, extreme difficulties,” Santiago said in a follow-up tweet. “And our leaders still incite violent actions by the police. It is a lot of human rights violations.”—AFP