Brazil, 10,000 deaths from Covid-19 and the highest R0 in the world. But Bolsonaro wants to barbecue.

There is nothing joking about looking at the facts. The cases multiply with the speed and methods seen around the world, and with the aggravating circumstance that the weak measures of social isolation adopted so far suggest the worst.. The 145,000 official cases of positivity, it is a general opinion, are even more underestimated than in the rest of the world, because few buffers are made. And hospitals are collapsing in various cities. Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Fortaleza, Manaus and Belem are the most affected cities and in the last two, both in the Amazon, the situation is tragic due to the lack of beds and respirators. Heat, therefore, has nothing to do except a paradox: in regions with a low incidence of respiratory disease, hospitals were less equipped at first. The race to mount emergency structures collides with the slow arrival of machines. There have already been scams and scandals in various cities over respirator supplies.

After two months in which the central government has minimized and the locals have taken fluctuating and smooth measures, Brazil now has the need to close the closings while people, like the rest of the world, dream of returning home. São Luiz, the capital of Maranhão, began to proclaim something it called “lockout,” followed by Belem and other smaller cities. While in Rio and Sao Paulo, where there would be more need, the governors and mayors are simply extending the closings in progress (schools, commerce) without finding the strength to prohibit everything non-essential from leaving the house. In Brazil, thanks to the collaboration of telephone operators, social distancing is calculated with some accuracy, even for neighborhoods. Well, in São Paulo, a megalopolis with 12 million inhabitants, the epicenter of the pandemic, not even 50 percent of people are in their homes. In Rio it is a little better, but it is still insufficient to crush the proverbial curve and reduce contagion. Magazine lancet It estimates that the well-known R0 index in Brazil is the highest in the world with 2.81 (in Italy it has been below unity).

In all of this, the pressure to reopen and restart the economy is as strong as in countries where the worst seems to be behind us. In recent days, Bolsonaro received a group of businessmen at the presidential palace, married his arguments and, on foot, all went to the headquarters of the Supreme Court, embarrassing its president, Dias Toffoli, who had to give them welcome and listen to them. . Pressure due to the fact that central government attempts to obey states and cities have so far found that judges are the main obstacle.