Politics behind plague in Brazil

By Helder Ferreira do Vale

As the coronavirus sweeps across the globe, more countries are increasingly converging towards the lockdown of cities. Yet Brazil's ultra-right President Jair Bolsonaro has emerged among world leaders as a dissonant voice against lockdowns.

In an attempt to weaken the initiatives of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and local politicians encouraging social distancing as a way to slow the spread of the virus, Bolsonaro is urging Brazil's population of 212 million to ignore the pandemic and carry on with business as usual.

On March 24, after the health ministry confirmed 2,200 cases of coronavirus infection and 46 deaths in Brazil (these numbers have multiplied 13-fold since then), Bolsonaro addressed the nation during a nationally televised speech insisting that “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept … we must, yes, get back to normal.”

In the address, he blamed the media for spreading panic around a “fantasy” and a “trick” that he considers a “minor cold.” A few days later in an unprecedented move, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram erased several messages posted on Bolsonaro's official accounts because they contained fictitious and misleading information about the coronavirus and called on citizens to take to the streets to protest quarantine measures.

Predictions from the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis of the Imperial College London suggest that Brazil, without the preventive measures of social distancing against the coronavirus outbreak, will have a death toll that will reach approximately one million fatalities.

These estimates indicate that if Brazil adopts early quarantine measures across the population, then the coronavirus death toll could be held to a range of 44,000―220,000, depending on how promptly and rigidly the quarantine is imposed.

Under these predictions, Bolsonaro's anti-quarantine discourse could compromise the lives of thousands of Brazilians. His indifference to human suffering and the loss of lives is now more blatant than ever.

There are countless remarks from Bolsonaro throughout his political career defending torture and violent dictators, as well as encouraging murderous security policies against the poor and minorities in Brazil. But now in the face of the pandemic, his genocidal message transcends mere rhetoric and invites the death of millions of Brazilians.

Bolsonaro's incompetency and inhumanity is accelerating his political isolation and his growing unpopularity among voters. In a political miscalculation, Bolsonaro interpreted the pandemic as an opportunity to advance his narrow political interests in two ways.

First, the Brazilian economy is giving undisputed signs of a fast-approaching recession as new projections for 2020 show negative GDP of -1.9 percent (XP Investimentos) as fears of the side effects of the coronavirus on the global economy increase.

Being aware of how the economic recession represents a real risk to the popularity and longevity of his already fragile government, Bolsonaro wants to blame the upcoming economic troubles on those authorities who locally imposed a quarantine.

Second, with the inevitable spread of the coronavirus in Brazil, Bolsonaro will also attempt to shirk his national public health duties and transfer responsibility to local authorities as chaos overwhelms the underfunded and crippled Brazilian public health system when the pandemic peaks.

Selfish political strategies should have no place in the fight against the coronavirus, but Bolsonaro simply doesn't know how to rise above his own egotistical frame of mind.

Brazil's preparedness to fight the pandemic is questionable. The number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds in Brazil has been reduced since 2009, and today the country has approximately 55,000 ICUs. Only half of these ICUs are public, and they are unevenly distributed across the country.

According to the study of the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, in the best possible scenario of successful early adoption of quarantine measures, Brazil will need 57,000 ICUs, but in the case of late quarantine adoption, that figure will increase to 460,000, falling far short of the demand.

Brazil's public health system is already under pressure as other diseases have hit hard across the country in recent years. According to the World Health Organization, Brazil is among the world's 30 “high burden” countries regarding tuberculosis, a disease that makes victims more susceptible to complications from the coronavirus.

To make this scenario even worse, from 2015 to 2019 tropical diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, all of which are transmitted by the same mosquito, have infected approximately 1.7 million people. In the first two months of 2020, Brazil experienced a 128 percent increase of dengue cases compared to the same period in 2019.

Brazilians are fighting not only a plague, but also the leadership style of a president who clearly ignores the increasing number of deaths that will surely result from further spread of the pandemic. The only good news in all of this is how the pandemic is awakening Brazil to the undeniable political reality that Bolsonaro deserves to be impeached.

The author is professor (helderdovale@gmail.com) at the Graduate School of International Area Studies (GSIAS), the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.