Coronavirus Sweeps Across Brazil, a Land Ill-Equipped to Fight It Cases and deaths pass China in South American behemoth with dense favelas, little testing and a leader dismissive of the virus
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-sweeps-across-brazil-a-land-ill-equipped-to-fight-it-11588603847?mod=hp_lead_pos5
In the tiny, stifling home she shared with seven relatives in the Amazon, Maria Portelo de Lima began coughing, started feeling weaker and, over a week, got sicker and sicker.
Her family tried to get the 61-year-old to a hospital in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million in the heart of the rainforest. They were told no ambulances were available or hospital beds free because of a flood of coronavirus patients.
Ms. de Lima died April 26. With so many other Covid-19 victims in the city, it took 30 hours for an ambulance to pick up her body. She was buried in a mass grave, her identity marked by a wooden cross that cost $22.
Covid-19, which has focused its fury most heavily on wealthier countries, now is hammering Brazil. Brazil has just passed China, the origin of the pandemic, both in confirmed cases, 101,147, and in deaths, 7,025, becoming the hardest-hit country in the developing world.
Unlike in China, which corralled the virus through stern restrictions, things in Latin America’s largest country are expected to get much worse. Infections are rising by more than 5,000 a day and deaths by nearly 500.
There is so little testing in Brazil that its real number of Covid-19 infections might be far higher than the official figure. One university study has estimated the total to date at higher than the U.S.’s world-leading 1.19 million.
In the tiny, stifling home she shared with seven relatives in the Amazon, Maria Portelo de Lima began coughing, started feeling weaker and, over a week, got sicker and sicker.
Her family tried to get the 61-year-old to a hospital in Manaus, a city of 2.2 million in the heart of the rainforest. They were told no ambulances were available or hospital beds free because of a flood of coronavirus patients.
Ms. de Lima died April 26. With so many other Covid-19 victims in the city, it took 30 hours for an ambulance to pick up her body. She was buried in a mass grave, her identity marked by a wooden cross that cost $22.
Covid-19, which has focused its fury most heavily on wealthier countries, now is hammering Brazil. Brazil has just passed China, the origin of the pandemic, both in confirmed cases, 101,147, and in deaths, 7,025, becoming the hardest-hit country in the developing world.
Unlike in China, which corralled the virus through stern restrictions, things in Latin America’s largest country are expected to get much worse. Infections are rising by more than 5,000 a day and deaths by nearly 500.
There is so little testing in Brazil that its real number of Covid-19 infections might be far higher than the official figure. One university study has estimated the total to date at higher than the U.S.’s world-leading 1.19 million.
Medical workers check a man with breathing problems in the São Paulo’s favela of Paraisópolis. A scarcity of coronavirus tests in Brazil limits them to health and safety professionals, the very sick and those who died and are suspected of having the virus.
Medical personnel disinfect rooms in a Paraisópolis sports hall used as a place to treat coronavirus patients. The virus is spreading in poor districts such as the favella, where 120,000 live in less than two square miles.
An elderly Covid-19 patient in her house in Paraisopolis.
The surge comes as Brazil’s president, an outspoken coronavirus skeptic, quarrels with state governors and infectious-disease experts who say his government should enact a national stay-at-home rule, as most of its Latin America neighbors have. Instead, President Jair Bolsonaro recently fired his health minister, who had urged stringent social isolation measures.
Mr. Bolsonaro has called the coronavirus a “little flu’’ and said that athletes such as himself were immune. He wades into crowds, shaking hands and urging that businesses closed by state governors reopen to save the economy.
Asked by a reporter last week about Brazil’s having topped China’s Covid-19 death toll, Mr. Bolsonaro shrugged and said, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you expect me to do?”
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