The World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed grave concern over the advance of the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil, particularly given the virulence and transmissibility of the virus’s P.1 variant and the rising number of cases and deaths. This past week was a particularly alarming one, with a record number of 1,910 daily deaths on March 3. Duke University epidemiologist Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, speaking from Brazil’s most populous state of São Paulo, told the U.S. National Public Radio that he fears the P.1 variant could mutate into even more infectious and lethal forms, which could make Brazil “the biggest biological reservoir of the coronavirus in the world.”
In March 5 remarks, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that if Brazil doesn’t get “serious, [the pandemic] will continue to affect all the neighborhood there and beyond,” posing a regional threat, Reuters reported him as saying. The situation is “very, very concerning,” he said, and Brazil’s neighbors are alarmed.
With good reason. According to many health professionals quoted by Spain’s El País and Brazilian and Ibero-American dailies, the country’s healthcare system is collapsing. As an example, El País pointed to Cascavel, a large urban center in the state of Parana, where saturation of ICU beds has reached 99%. Intubated patients are being kept in hallways, and ambulances are used as spaces for beds. The shortage of equipment is such that the hospital even made an emergency request to the local zoo, for a respirator and infusion pumps normally used for animals. But such situations are being repeated around the country, in state after state. Patients used to be constantly transferred from one city to another, because of a lack of beds in one location, but according to an International Press Service report March 8, this is no longer the case, because all hospital beds in all cities are full.
Dr. Mike Ryan, director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, has praised the efforts of state governors who, in the absence of any coordinated federal effort, have enforced mitigation efforts, and worked to obtain vaccines in an otherwise slow vaccine rollout nationwide. But, El País reports, state health secretaries fear “an imminent national collapse of the public and private health network,” unless a national curfew is imposed, along with lockdown in those areas most seriously affected—something the psychopathic President Jair Bolsonaro refuses to do. The Argentine daily Hoy de Córdoba reported March 8 that São Paulo’s health authorities recently issued a call for “volunteers for the war” against COVID. Dr. Nicolelis, cited above, told NPR, “You feel you are in Stalingrad, in World War II. You’re surrounded by the enemy. Food is ending. There is no calling for help, because nobody can get out to get help. And you just see your comrades dying, your friends, your parents, your relatives, your childhood friends.”
