Around the world, would-be Donald Trumps have discovered the simplest way to keep their numbers down on COVID-19 isn’t to practice social distancing, or engage in extensive programs of case tracing, or construct quarantine facilities. The easiest answer is much, much simpler: don’t bother to test. And nowhere seems to be putting that strategy to better use than Brazil, where Trump protege Jair Bolsonaro has been singularly disdainful of the whole pandemic. Long after even Trump had been forced to pretend to care, Bolsonaro was scoffing at the whole idea of there being any danger, deliberately courting crowds, shaking hands, and disparaging opposition politicians who tried to raise even a modest level of concern. Last weekend, Bolsonaro deliberately wiped his nose, then shook hands with an elderly supporter while the cameras rolled and he joked about the “little flu.”
Instead of helping his nation, Brazil’s anti-environment, anti-gay rights, anti-women’s rights, anti-native rights, anti-science, anti-sense president brushed the entire pandemic off as a worldwide media “hysteria” over a disease that was no more than a “bit of a cold.” As a result, Brazil has one of the lowest testing rates in the world. With 63,000 tests, it has actually tested fewer people than the state of Tennessee which is … not great. As a result, while Brazil is now closing in on an official 2,000 deaths, there are reasons to believe the real number is much larger. Much larger. Like … acres of mass graves larger.
Trump cheered Bolsonaro’s election and has frequently cited him as one of his favorite foreign leaders. And there’s no mistaking why; Bolsonaro shares all of Trump’s racism, disdain for the press, and delusions about his own brilliance.
On Thursday, Bolsonaro clashed with Health Minister Luiz Mandetta. Mandetta is the Brazilian equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci—the one member of the administration who consistently warned the public against the threat of coronavirus, encouraged social distancing, and earned the public trust. Naturally, Bolsonaro ended the day by sacking Mandetta. And, because it’s 2020, all of this happened in the one true public forum … Twitter.
Afterward, Bolsonaro made his daily address to the nation to declare that things “need to get back to normal” and that there needed to be “flexibility” in social distancing rules. And he continued to disparage the threat from coronavirus, to call it the little flu, and to suggest that the rest of the world was filled with wimps who don’t want to get back to work.
Of course, Brazil is reporting an order of magnitude fewer cases of COVID-19 and an order of magnitude fewer deaths than the United States. Which may make it seem like things are not so bad in a nation with a population greater than Italy and Spain combined. Yeah … about that. Not only is the number of cases continuing to soar in Brazil, that number seems to be completely disconnected with the actual incidence of disease. If the numbers in the United States are still constrained by testing (and they are) the numbers in Brazil are a fraction of what’s really happening. Because Bolsonaro is very deliberately not looking to see how bad things really are.
With only a seventh of the official cases in New York State alone, Brazilian hospitals are nonetheless overrun by COVID-19 cases and even the official case fatality rate has been growing by a percent a week. But it’s not the official numbers that are the real concern.
As BBC News reports, there has been an absolute “explosion” of unofficial cases—cases that aren’t included in the 30,000 official tally. As gravediggers work 24/7 to prepare space for the bodies rolling into the nation’s largest cemetery, researchers estimate that the real number of cases in Brazil isn’t 30,000 or 100,000, but over 300,000. And the number of deaths may already be ten or twenty times that reported.
But then, the little flu won’t ever be more than a little flu even if it devastates the country. Bolsonaro controls the testing and controls the official numbers. Brazil is a nation of 200 million … for now. And it still has a lot of room for more graves.
Hundreds of new graves stand open for COVID-19 victims in Brazil.
