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Trump cheered Bolsonaro’s election and has frequently cited him as one of his favorite foreign leaders. And there’s no mistaking why; Bolsonaro shares all of Trump’s racism, disdain for the press, and delusions about his own brilliance.
On Thursday, Bolsonaro clashed with Health Minister Luiz Mandetta. Mandetta is the Brazilian equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci—the one member of the administration who consistently warned the public against the threat of coronavirus, encouraged social distancing, and earned the public trust. Naturally, Bolsonaro ended the day by sacking Mandetta. And, because it’s 2020, all of this happened in the one true public forum … Twitter.
Afterward, Bolsonaro made his daily address to the nation to declare that things “need to get back to normal” and that there needed to be “flexibility” in social distancing rules. And he continued to disparage the threat from coronavirus, to call it the little flu, and to suggest that the rest of the world was filled with wimps who don’t want to get back to work.
Of course, Brazil is reporting an order of magnitude fewer cases of COVID-19 and an order of magnitude fewer deaths than the United States. Which may make it seem like things are not so bad in a nation with a population greater than Italy and Spain combined. Yeah … about that. Not only is the number of cases continuing to soar in Brazil, that number seems to be completely disconnected with the actual incidence of disease. If the numbers in the United States are still constrained by testing (and they are) the numbers in Brazil are a fraction of what’s really happening. Because Bolsonaro is very deliberately not looking to see how bad things really are.
With only a seventh of the official cases in New York State alone, Brazilian hospitals are nonetheless overrun by COVID-19 cases and even the official case fatality rate has been growing by a percent a week. But it’s not the official numbers that are the real concern.
As BBC News reports, there has been an absolute “explosion” of unofficial cases—cases that aren’t included in the 30,000 official tally. As gravediggers work 24/7 to prepare space for the bodies rolling into the nation’s largest cemetery, researchers estimate that the real number of cases in Brazil isn’t 30,000 or 100,000, but over 300,000. And the number of deaths may already be ten or twenty times that reported.
But then, the little flu won’t ever be more than a little flu even if it devastates the country. Bolsonaro controls the testing and controls the official numbers. Brazil is a nation of 200 million … for now. And it still has a lot of room for more graves.
