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The Rio de Janeiro state renewed this Thursday partial quarantine measures imposed since late March to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, which has already claimed nearly 6,000 lives in Brazil.
Against the intentions of the President Jair Bolsonaro to normally maintain the activity in the country, the decree of the Governor Wilson Witzel establishes that school and university classes, mass events and non-essential commercial services will continue to be suspended until May 11.
However, in an interview with the newspaper O Globo, Witzel assured that for now he discards stricter measures, such as mandatory quarantine.
“I am not thinking of a complete closure,” he said.
As ordered in March, initially until this Thursday, supermarkets, bakeries and warehouses can remain open (respecting social distance measures), and restaurants can only operate with home deliveries.
Unlike the quarantines that lasted for weeks in other countries in the region, such as Argentina, in Brazil no state has strictly restricted the movement of people, that they are exhorted to prioritize remote work, to avoid non-essential exits and not to frequent beaches and parks.
In Rio de Janeiro, a state with 17 million inhabitants and the second most affected after the neighbor Sao Paulo, 854 deaths and 9,453 confirmed cases were officially registered, but the authorities themselves acknowledge that there is a high degree of underreporting.
“Considering underreporting, we should have today in the state of Rio something around 140,000 infected, 15 to 20 times more than the official number,” said the Secretary of Health of the state of Rio, Edmar Santos, in an interview with TV Globo this Thursday.
For this reason, Santos warned that Rio may register a collapse situation in the next “three or four weeks” similar to that of countries such as Italy, Spain and the United States.
With that number of infected, Santos estimates that 7,000 people will need to be admitted to Intensive Care Units (ICU), something “humanly impossible for any health system in the world. Italy did not, Spain did not and neither did the United States. ”
According to Santos, adding the efforts of the authorities of the state of Rio and of all its municipalities, the number of ICU beds could be expanded to 3,400. But above that number, even if more beds could be installed, qualified medical personnel would be lacking.
In total, Brazil registered 5,901 deaths and 85,380 confirmed cases until Thursday, according to data from the Ministry of Health. But specialists point out that this figure could be up to 15 times higher, due to the lack of tests.
The worst hit state is Sao Paulo with 2,8698 confirmed cases and 2,375 deaths.
Since the start of the pandemic, Bolsonaro has downplayed its severity and criticized the measures imposed by the governors, alleging that the economic consequences of the stoppage will be worse than those caused by the virus itself.
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