If Trump had had his way, this is what would be happening here:
The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives.
But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s mayor, argued there was a greater imperative.
“Put your life on the line so that we can save the economy,” Mr. Melo appealed to his constituents in late February.
Now Porto Alegre, a prosperous city in southern Brazil, is at the heart of an stunning breakdown of the country’s health care system — a crisis foretold.
More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.
Sound familiar? The following is a perfect illustration of what would have happened here if Trump had free reign:
President Bolsonaro, who continues to promote ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs to treat the disease, has also said lockdowns are untenable in a country where so many people live in poverty. While several Brazilian states have ordered business shutdowns in recent weeks, there have been no strict lockdowns.
Some of the president’s supporters in Porto Alegre have protested business shutdowns in recent days, organizing caravans that stop outside of hospitals and blast their horns while inside Covid wards overflow.
Epidemiologists say Brazil could have avoided additional lockdowns if the government had promoted the use of masks and social distancing and aggressively negotiated access to the vaccines being developed last year.
Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, called Covid-19 a “measly flu,” often encouraged large crowds and created a false sense of security among supporters by endorsing anti-malaria and anti-parasite drugs — contradicting leading health officials who warned that they were ineffective.
Last year, Mr. Bolsonaro’s government took a pass on Pfizer’s offer of tens of millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine. Later, the president celebrated setbacks in clinical trials for CoronaVac, the Chinese-made vaccine that Brazil came to largely rely on, and joked that pharmaceutical companies would not be held responsible if people who got newly developed vaccines turned into alligators.
“The government initially dismissed the threat of the pandemic, then the need for preventive measures, and then goes against science by promoting miracle cures,” said Natália Pasternak, a microbiologist in São Paulo. “That confuses the population, which means people felt safe going out in the street.”
They managed to convince the braindead Trump to have the government pay to have vaccines manufactured in advance so they would be ready to roll if they turned out to be effective and it’s literally the only thing he did right. We are just very lucky that he wasn’t re-elected because he would have botched the rollout as badly as he botched everything else — as his soulmate Bolsonaro has done and continues to do in Brazil. And we are lucky that in many states they had sentient leadership that kept the entire country from acting like Florida and making everything worse.
And, by the way, we did lose almost 550,000 people and counting so it’s not as if we did that much better. But this imminent 4th surge will probably result in fewer deaths because they’ve managed to vaccinate 70% of people over 65. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any deaths and it almost all because of the Trumpish attitude that it’s just “a measly flu.” There are still a whole lot of people who believe that.