Yahoo Finance Brazil keeps partying as deadly Covid variant rages
In Rio de Janeiro, summer is in full swing. The sun is intense, the golden sands of Copacabana and Ipanema beaches are obscured with bronzed bodies and colourful parasols, and Christ the Redeemer provides the backdrop to sunset hikes over the mountains. These are iconic scenes from a marvellous city — but right now, they tell a disturbing story.
Intensive care units are at 90 per cent capacity and the city has the highest death toll in the country. And yet, many residents — few wearing masks — have packed its beaches since June. At night it’s no different, with many flocking the streets, bars and nightclubs seeking respite from the sweltering heat. In the vast north zone of the city — a sprawling residential area that is home to the majority of the city’s favelas — I am told that venues playing baile funk, a sort of Brazilian hip-hop, are packed with clubbers every weekend. Concerned about the pandemic-battered economy, the mayor Eduardo Paes has rejected a lockdown, stating: “No one wants to close the city. Everything is open.”
This obstinacy in the face of a ravaging disease is one of the reasons why Brazil has become a global cautionary tale. The country — the largest in South America, with a population of 213 million — has the third highest death toll in the world, ranking only behind the United States and India. To date, 220,061 people have died of the virus.
The country’s far-Right President Jair Bolsonaro’s response to the pandemic has been powerfully criticised: he has downplayed the situation, opposed quarantine measures, and gone through two health ministers. On Sunday, anti-Bolsonaro protesters marched in cities including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. A relaxation of rules — which are inconsistent between the states of this vast country — around Christmas and New Year has also been blamed for an increased transmission in cases, and the inadequacy of mass testing has been disastrous for allowing the virus to spread unchecked.
Researchers at Fiocruz, a highly esteemed Brazilian institute for public health, say that the lack of mass testing could have “weakened the information” about the advance of the pandemic. São Paulo’s secretary of health, Jean Gorinchteyn, has admitted that the state’s hospitals are on the brink: the area reported its highest number of new weekly infections from January 10 to 16 since the start of the pandemic, with 79,106 confirmed cases, a nine per cent increase from the previous week.
Watch: Brazil struggles to keep up with rising COVID-19 infections
A sign of the severity of the situation in Brazil is that emergency supplies of oxygen have been trucked in from Venezuela, a bankrupt nation with one of the most non-functioning health services in the world.
Then there is the P.1 variant — a mutation that appears to make the virus more transmissible, which is thought to have originated in Manaus, a city deep in the Amazon, and to have been circulating in Brazil since last July. Countries including the UK have sealed their borders against arrivals from Brazil. There are fears that vaccines might be less effective on this highly contagious variant. Manaus is in a state of emergency. It endured a devastating first wave last year and never recovered. Its healthcare system has now all but collapsed, and a shortage of oxygen means many patients have died by suffocation. Soldiers are collecting the dead and transporting their bodies to other parts of the country.
Jamie Kennerley, a cameraman covering the crisis, has said Manaus feels “medieval”. Residents are terrified and angry. The attorney general’s office has claimed that officials from the federal health ministry were warned nearly a week before oxygen and other medical shortages ran out but failed to act.
Many people believed Manaus had achieved herd immunity after the virus ravaged the city during its first wave, but as Jesem Orellana, a local researcher and epidemiologist from Fiocruz, points out, the surge in cases casts doubt on the hypothesis, which he blames for allowing the virus to run freely. He says that the state and federal government used the theory of herd immunity to strengthen their anti-lockdown rhetoric in the name of saving Brazil’s economy.
Now, as people lose family members to a catastrophic second wave, faith in science, the media and authorities is low. “I don’t know who to believe. I stopped watching the news. We don’t know what is fake and what isn’t,” explains resident Alanna Smith, who has had family die from Covid-19 at home due to a lack of intensive care beds. Orellana blames the President. “Bolsonaro needs to stop with this negationalist rhetoric. He has consistently referred to the pandemic as a ‘little flu’ and people have believed it.”
A nationwide vaccination programme started on January 18, giving the country a glimmer of hope — and there was a powerful symbolism to seeing healthcare workers administering jabs at the feet of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue.
“This must be the world’s most spectacular launches of a Covid vaccination campaign to have taken place,” a local journalist tweeted.
Still, experts are concerned that the country has only six million doses for a population of 213 million. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has also been a vocal critic of vaccines and has refused to take one himself — in December — invoking anti-vaxxer mythology around the Pfizer vaccine.
“In the Pfizer contract it’s very clear: ‘we’re not responsible for any side effects.’ If you turn into a crocodile, it’s your problem.” His opposition to the vaccine means the jab has fast become political ammunition: it was São Paulo’s state governor João Doria — a former reality TV star who is widely expected to challenge Bolsonaro for the Presidency in 2022 — and not Bolsonaro himself, who oversaw the first vaccination of a nurse in São Paulo.
The roll-out will not be straightforward. Besides the shortage of doses, the government has established priority groups for the vaccine, but authorities have yet to provide a plan. Vulnerable communities are afraid. “We have a very low immunity to Western diseases. I fear that this vaccine won’t arrive to all of the 16 different ethnic groups that inhabit our village,” says Kaiti Yawalapiti, from the indigenous Xingu park in the Mato Grosso state.
Experts hope that Manaus’s horror story will be a warning to ramp up containment measures. Here in Rio, I worry we’ll find out the hard way.
Watch: What is long COVID?
@Cp1700Peet
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