Today, Explained - Brazil’s coronavirus disaster

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

President Jair Bolsonaro called it the "sniffles" and recommended hydroxychloroquine. Now the country has over a million confirmed cases. Reporter Gustavo Ribeiro explains how Brazil could become the next epicenter. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When it comes to COVID-19, no one does it worse than the United States. We've got 2 million confirmed cases and counting. We never fully shut down, but we're super into reopening.

And now we're seeing huge COVID spikes all over the country. Europe is considering reopening its borders, but banning Americans from traveling there. The border with Canada remains closed. Nobody wants to play in the sandbox with us because we are the worst. We're number one. But Brazil is catching up. And the similarities are astonishing. Never really shut down, check. A president recommending hydroxychloroquine, check. Concerns over healthcare infrastructure, check. But unlike the United States, Brazil has the added risk that if things get really, really bad, the military might step in and take over. So long, democracy. We got in touch with Gustavo Ribeiro to find out how close Brazil is to that desperate scenario. I'm a journalist, a political scientist, and I am in Sao Paulo.

He runs the Brazilian Report. It's an English-language news site that covers Brazilian politics. We spoke just after Brazil hit a familiar-sounding milestone. Over one million people have been infected here. Over 50,000 people died. And that makes the pandemic the single deadliest event in Brazilian history. Of course, barring colonization and slavery. But it has already killed more people than our war against Paraguay in the 19th century, which lasted for six full years.

And it has only been four months since the first case was confirmed here. We are now confirming more cases per day on a seven-day average basis than any other country in the world. And that's despite Brazil having more than 100 million fewer people than the US. COVID-19 got to Brazil late in February and it was a disease of the rich because COVID-19 did not come from Asia to Brazil. It came from Europe. It came from wealthier Brazilians who were either doing business trips to northern Italy or having a vacation trip. The thing is, a lot of people simply disregarded the coronavirus as a little flu getting their cue from our president, who has called it the sniffles.

It was just a little cold, said Brazil's president, when the crisis started. So nobody was really concerned about the coronavirus at the beginning. And we saw a lot of boss to housemaid transmission. And then the housemaid who would go back to her neighborhood and then, in fact, family members and members of her neighborhood. So the first case of a COVID-19 death in the state of Rio was very telling of that dynamic. It was a 63-year-old housemate who worked for a wealthy family

in an upscale neighborhood in Rio. And her boss did not mention she had contracted the coronavirus. She infected the housemate. When the housemate started showing symptoms, she then took a two-hour taxi back to her home in a countryside town north of Rio. And since she was diabetic, she had a history of high blood pressure.

She died in the following afternoon. Gustavo, you live in the biggest city in South America. What's the COVID situation there? Sao Paulo is the Brazilian epicenter of the coronavirus. If we count the greater Sao Paulo area, 23, 25 million people, and we are seeing the disease spreading around lower income neighborhoods. And that's why also it has become so much more deadly than it was at the beginning of the outbreak. At this homeless shelter in Sao Paulo, the beds have been full since the start of the pandemic. Any suspected of COVID are set aside in this room. For several weeks, a team of nine medics from Doctors Without Borders has come to take their temperatures and identify cases.

Some projections have that Sao Paulo alone could have up to 1.2 million cases and now the virus is travelling through the countryside at a fast pace. But the first cities to see a healthcare collapse were in the Amazon states. When we talk about the Amazon states, we're not talking only about the indigenous or the native communities, but a lot of urban communities. We have a few urban centers there. Most cities there simply do not have an intensive care unit. Sometimes they don't even have hospitals. The mortality rate among Brazil's indigenous people is twice as high as other Brazilians. The military has been sent in to help communities with testing,

but some in the Amazon region say it's too late and accuse the president of abandoning them. A lot of people die before even realizing that they got the coronavirus and before having the opportunity to get treatment. And then the fact that biologically, many of these communities, because they're so reclusive, because they have so little contact with urban populations, they're even less prepared. But when you get the map of the coronavirus spread and then you see the roads and the rivers,

that explains you the path of the virus. Because, for instance, river transportation is the number one transportation in the Amazon. And that means that a lot of people are close to each other in small boats, traveling for several hours often. And if one person is infected, we can have dozens of people leaving the boat carrying the virus as well. So that's how the virus spread so quickly. And then there's also the fact that these areas are extremely warm. Sometimes they live five, six, seven people in small shacks, and then you ask them to stay at home with 80% humidity and 35 degrees Celsius heat. So social distancing was very hard to implement in these areas.

And it never really was followed by the population. So that also helps explain why the coronavirus spread so quickly in the Amazon. Bodies lie on hospital trolleys in the city of Manaus in the north, while doctors tell us the health system across the country is collapsing. We saw Manaus, which is the biggest city in the Amazon, it was the first to experience a full-scale collapse to the point that burial services,

they were not prepared to dig as many graves and they didn't have enough coffins for everyone. They've buried hundreds upon hundreds here and they're ready for thousands more. This is just one cemetery where they're filling the graves as fast as they can dig them. Still, not fast enough. We are stuck in the worst of two worlds here. The economy is tanking as it is everywhere

in the world. But the problem is we have a very informal economy, which means that tens of millions of people in Brazil, it's not that they live paycheck to paycheck. They have to go out every single day and make their living in order to have something to eat. Fears of running out of food outweigh any fears from the coronavirus. In downtown Rio de Janeiro, the Flamengo football squad does the rounds twice a week. They've already distributed more than 600 meals. But as more months go by, the requests only increase. It's very hard for these people to simply stay home.

So we are stuck in a place where people are still going outside and the virus is still spreading. We don't have a fully functioning economy, but we're not controlling the outbreak. It's really hard to blame COVID-19 on anyone, but in Brazil, it's pretty easy to point a finger at President Jair Bolsonaro. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. That's after a quick break on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about Jair Bolsonaro, huh? Oh, yeah. You cannot talk about the coronavirus in Brazil without talking about Jair Bolsonaro. It's really hard in this kind of situation to attribute blame to specific individuals, but I think it's safe to say that in Brazil's case,

President Jair Bolsonaro might be the single biggest responsible for things getting so bad so quickly. From the get-go, he undermined the severity of the crisis, the lethality of the virus. He called it sniffles, a little flu. And then there's this now infamous exchange last month when President Bolsonaro was asked about a record number of coronavirus deaths in Brazil.

So what? I mourn the deaths? What do you want me to do? I can't perform miracles. He said that we should by no means get into social isolation, So what? I mourn the deaths? What do you want me to do? I can't perform miracles. He said that we should by no means get into social isolation that should be reserved only for the elderly and for at-risk populations. He has incited insurrection from his supporters against governors who have enforced quarantine measures. We're here in support of our president, Jair Bolsonaro. We want to go back to work. We want support for shopkeepers, support for entrepreneurs. These people here in Sao Paulo today are in support of Brazil. And he has joined protests and demonstrations against social isolations.

He's openly disagreed with advice from his own health ministry, saying measures such as social distancing are costing jobs and are more dangerous than the virus itself. He has created social gatherings himself. Sao Paulo's governor used to be an ally. It's amazing when you have two virus to combat, the coronavirus and Bolsonaro virus. And he has gotten rid of two health ministers amid a pandemic.

Wait a second, Gustavo. You guys don't have a health minister right now? Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. Oh my gosh. We have an army general with no medical experience who is the interim health minister. The number one strategy of the government to control the crisis was not to increase

testing, was not to give money to people so people can afford to stay home, was simply to hide the numbers. So a couple of weeks ago, the official dashboard of the health ministry went off air. And for hours, we had absolutely no idea what had happened. And when it came back on air, it didn't bring the total tallies, just the new daily cases and deaths, which means hiding the true extent of the outbreak because people don't have the records to know, okay, if we have 10,000 new cases, how many cases we have in total. And it took the Supreme Court to intervene, so the Bolsonaro administration put the dashboard back in place. But the problem is that it has discredited the official data. So a recent poll showed that 70% of Brazilians do not trust the coronavirus data, 35% because they think it is understated, and 35%, which pretty

much coincides with the president's base of support, thinks they are overstated. And meanwhile, 4% of Brazilians believe the coronavirus is not real at all. Which is to say that despite utterly failing to contain this in any way and literally mocking the pandemic, Jair Bolsonaro still has significant support in the country. Significant is a big word. He is among democratically elected leaders in Brazil, the least popular one. However, controlling one-third of the electorate amid a pandemic with a job apocalypse that is going to strike us very soon, with the sheer amount of scandal his administration has faced over the past year, It's quite remarkable if you think of it. But with bankruptcies starting to rise in Brazil,

with businessmen being disgruntled for social isolation, we have seen him losing support among wealthier classes. However, the government has put in place a few months ago a $120 stipend for vulnerable populations. It isn't much, but for many people, it is more money in a month than they have ever seen. We have to remember that Brazil has 14 million people below the poverty line. So for these people, the government aid boosted Jair Bolsonaro's support among less educated and lower income voters. But as soon as the stipend is canceled, we should see Jair Bolsonaro's approval ratings plummeting very quickly. Parallel to the coronavirus crisis, we are seeing multiple corruption investigations

against the president and against his sons. So the government is extremely cornered and it is a president under siege. Under siege. It makes me think of Brazil's history of authoritarian rule, of military rule. Is the military backing Bolsonaro or are they watching him closely and ready to step in if this pandemic continues to grow out of control? Sean, this is the $1 million question. Not even during the military dictatorship did we have so many military officers

in the executive branch. A recent count had like 3,000 members of the three armed forces, so Navy, Air Force, and the army in the government. Keeping their position ambiguous is what makes them so powerful in Brazil. Nobody goes against their interest in terms of military pensions, salaries. They are a very privileged class in Brazil. And because nobody actually knows where they stand in terms of the respect towards democracy, that makes them very powerful actors in the political arena right now. Where do you see this ending up, Gustavo? I mean, the pandemic is the second worst anywhere in the world in Brazil, and we assume that all of the numbers have been underreported, undercounted.

You've got a president who is continuing to just mock it and not even take it seriously. His support is eroding and a financial crisis is all but certain. How worried are you for Brazil? Politically, it's hard to predict what's going to happen. I mean, it's politics and it's Brazil, so anything can happen. I do see things getting much worse for a longer time before we have a solution, because the president is not strong enough to impose his will on other branches of government, but he's not weak enough to simply be tossed aside by the political establishment.

So we're going to see this tug of war continue for the foreseeable future. However, on the pandemic side of things, I think it's safe to say that when we have a sanitary crisis spiraling out of control and we have an economic depression knocking on our doors, it's safe to say that we're heading towards a humanitarian crisis in Brazil. And that's fuel for social unrest. And it would shock me if we don't see a deterioration of the social fabric. I'm very scared of what kind of society will we have in the post-pandemic world. I'm really scared.

Gustavo, I wish you all the best and we're hoping for the best for Brazil. Thank you. Gustavo Ribeiro runs the Brazilian Report. Again, it's in English, so don't worry about your rusty Portuguese. Find it at Brazilian.Report. you