Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. 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. Graphic: 91-DIVOC
Covid-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in Brazil, 27 March 2021. On 24 March 2021, Brazil recorded 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

By Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado
27 March 2021

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (The New York Times) – 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.

“We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude,” said Ana de Lemos, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in Brazil. “And we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

On Wednesday, the country surpassed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. Health officials in public and private hospitals were scrambling to expand critical care units, stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen and procure scarce intubation sedatives that are being sold at an exponential markup.

A coffin maker in Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre, a prosperous city in southern Brazil, is at the heart of an stunning breakdown of the country’s health care system in March 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads unchecked. Photo: Mauricio Lima / The New York Times
A coffin maker in Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre, a prosperous city in southern Brazil, is at the heart of an stunning breakdown of the country’s health care system in March 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads unchecked. Photo: Mauricio Lima / The New York Times

Intensive care units in Brasília, the capital, and 16 of Brazil’s 26 states report dire shortages of available beds, with capacity below 10 percent, and many are experiencing rising contagion (when 90 percent of such beds are full the situation is considered dire.)

In Rio Grande do Sul, the state that includes Porto Alegre, the waiting list for intensive care unit beds doubled over the past two weeks, to 240 critically ill patients. […]

“The entire system is on the verge of collapse,” said Paulo Fernando Scolari, the hospital’s director. “People are coming in with more serious symptoms, lower oxygen levels, in desperate need of treatment.” […]

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. [more]

A Collapse Foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 Outbreak Overwhelmed Hospitals