Brazil has taken, Saturday 8 August, a fateful step : the country became the second country to exceed the 100 000 died of the coronavirus, after the United States, a hecatomb, to which the president Jair Bolsonaro has said to have the "clear conscience" despite the criticism. The largest country in Latin America, with a population of 212 million inhabitants, has also taken the Saturday another symbolic threshold, that of the 3 million people infected.
The official figures (100 477 dead and 3 012 412 confirmed cases of contamination), however, must be relativized because of the lack of testing, the experts considered that the total number of infected people could be up to six times higher. Brazil deplores 478 deaths per million inhabitants, a figure equivalent to that of the United States (487), but lower than that of Spain (609) or Italy (583).
A first death on the 12th of march
More than 1,000 daily deaths are recorded on average for the past several weeks, as the pandemic enters its sixth month in the country. The first confirmed case of Covid-19 has been identified in São Paulo on 26 February, and the first death on the 12th of march, also in the megalopolis. The threshold of 50 000 dead has been gone over a hundred days later, but this total was then doubled in half the time.
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The pace of contamination has accelerated in recent weeks in the countryside, inland and in areas where the virus arrived later, especially in the South and Center-West. On the other hand, it is stable in the southeastern States, such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the most affected in absolute terms, and declining in the Northern regions, where the situation was dire in April and may.
"The arrogance of a president"
On the beach of Copacabana, in Rio, the NGO Rio de Paz organized a Saturday morning a release 1,000 red balloons in tribute to those who have died of Covid-19 in Brazil, with 100 black crosses planted in the sand. The former left-wing president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) on Saturday denounced on Twitter " the arrogance of a president who has chosen to qualify this virus it cruel to small flu, defying science, and even death, and that carries in his soul the responsibility of thousands of lives lost ". "This is the war the most devastating that has ever befallen our country. The war of the negligence, of the absence of a health policy, a lesson of inhumanity ", said Marco Lucchesi, president of the Academy of brazilian Letters.
The pandemic has cast a harsh light on the inequalities of Brazil, the virus causing havoc in the favelas, particularly affecting black populations. He did not spare the indigenous people of the Amazon, including a grand chief, Aritana Yawalapiti died of the coronavirus this week.
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"It's not the war with the doctors"
" Chronicle of 100,000 dead announced ", said Saturday in an editorial in the journal Folhade S. Paulo. The government has handled the pandemic chaotic, with the departure of two ministers of Health in the midst of a crisis health. The portfolio no longer has a holder for almost four months, the president Bolsonaro who has been named as the interim a-general, Eduardo Pazuello.
"We did not war with doctors, just like you can't take care of Health with military members," said Luiz Henrique Mandetta, minister of Health sacked mid-April after having defended the importance of the confinement, rejected by the head of State. "100 000 families bereaved by the Covid-19) have not had the slightest word of comfort on the part of the government," he added, in an interview published Saturday in the daily O Globo.
But Jair Bolsonaro, itself contaminated by the virus last month, has assured Thursday that it had "a clear conscience" and had done " all (his) possible to save lives ". The leader of the far-right has also dealt with the "dictators" of the governors of the States, having taken containment measures for which it has always opposed, in the name of the preservation of the economy. The déconfinement started in June in many States, even those where the rate of infections remained high. The national football championship resumed on Saturday, with three months of delay, with matches behind closed doors.
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