By Adeyinka Olaiya/Brazil
Brazil has declared a state of emergency as the country hit a total amount of three hundred thousand deaths due to coronavirus. In Just two and a half months after crossing the trench of 200 thousand deaths, Brazil accumulated another hundred thousand victims and reached, on Wednesday (24), the scary 300 thousand deaths by Covid-19. The number is so large that it exceeds the population of 98.3% of the 5,570 Brazilian cities.
From March 2020 until 8 pm this Wednesday, the country totaled 301,087 deaths, having surpassed 300 thousand at 4:24 pm. Amid this growing mountain of dead, the health network collapses in all regions of the country, medicines are scarce and oxygen is lacking.
In the population projections of the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) of 2020, only 93 cities – or 1.7% of the total – have a population of more than 301 thousand people.
The lethality of the pandemic in Brazil is also evident when the comparison is made on a worldwide scale. With only 2.7% of the global population, Brazil accounts for 11% of Covid-19 deaths registered in all countries so far, according to data from University of Saopaulo. In other words: the share of deaths by Covid in the country, within the world total, is four times its share in the planetary population.
On average over the past seven days, of every 4 people who died from Covid on the planet, 1 was in Brazil.
But the progress of the disease – accelerated by the spread of coronavirus variants and the lack of national containment policies – is also felt in the numbers that accompany us every day.
On Tuesday (24), the country for the first time surpassed the mark of 3,000 deaths registered in 24 hours, surpassed only by the USA, which transcended the 4,000 deaths in one day in January, before cooling off (today the country ruled by Joe Biden has an average of 1,000 daily deaths, despite having a population more than 50% larger than the Brazilian one).
The moving average of deaths was 2,279, interrupting 25 consecutive days of record because of the lag in the system. The statistical instrument serves precisely to alleviate any technical problems that affect the count.
The level above the thousand daily deaths, so feared in 2020, was installed 63 days ago. The registered cases of the disease, probably underreported due to the scarcity of tests in the country, are compared to the population of São Paulo, the largest Brazilian metropolis: 12.2 million.
The country also faces a shortage of drugs used for the intubation of patients. Hospitals and medical associations have alerted the federal government to the drop in the stock of painkillers, sedatives and muscle blockers used for the intubation of patients in ICUs, which can only last another 15 days in Brazil.
The shortage of medications has forced medical teams to work with second- or third-line drugs, in a rationed manner, which can cause more suffering to patients, in addition to impairment in adapting to mechanical ventilation and more deaths, according to intensive care doctors interviewed by Folha.
To try to avoid the collapse of the ICUs, Anvisa (National Health Surveillance Agency) The drug controlling ministry of Brazil decided to adopt emergency regulatory measures, such as the possibility of direct import of inputs by hospitals. In addition, the Ministry of Health announced new administrative requests for medicines, made directly to manufacturers.
Meanwhile , the country is practically in a total lockdown since 2 weeks now .
