Brazil: Does the government want to hide the coronavirus dead?

Regional health authorities in Brazil have accused the government of Jair Bolsonaro (our photo) of "making invisible" the dead of the coronavirus. Sergio LIMA / AFP

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On Saturday June 6, regional health authorities in Brazil accused the government of Jair Bolsonaro of "making invisible" the dead of the coronavirus, after an official of the Ministry of Health had questioned the official toll.

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"  The authoritarian, insensitive, inhuman and unethical attempt to make the dead of Covid-19 invisible will not succeed  ," said the National Council of Health Secretaries, an organization which brings together authorities, on Saturday June 6. health centers in Brazil. The day before, the Ministry of Health of this country had stopped communicating on the total of deaths on the national territory , to give only the number of the last 24 hours. The website with public statistics had also been deleted that day, and returned online Saturday with only the figures on the last day, with no regional or previous results.

A "  tragedy  "

"  From the point of view of health, it is a tragedy that we are witnessing (...) Not informing means that the state is more harmful than the virus  ", accused, Saturday, in an interview broadcast on the social media former Bolsonaro Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta sacked in April after expressing disagreement with federal government policy. Friday, the acting secretary for Science, Technology and Strategic Equipments Carlos Wizard had affirmed to the newspaper Globo that the official balance sheet was going to be revised downwards because of " fanciful and manipulated  " figures  .

The regional authorities which make it possible to say they were scandalized. "  His statement, rude, fallacious, devoid of any ethical sense, of humanity and of respect, deserves our deep contempt, our disapproval and our disgust  ", they wrote. Asked by AFP on Saturday, Wizard said the figures were actually not going to be revised. "  We are not interested in digging up the dead. We don't want to revise the past, we are more concerned with the present and the future,  ”he said.

"  Early treatment  "

This millionaire who made his fortune from the teaching of English has no experience in the health field. But he criticized the results of Mr. Mandetta, a doctor. “  When the first cases emerged, the chosen orientation was that with the first symptoms, you should not go to the hospital, because that would cause a gathering of people. If the disease progressed, people had to see a doctor. Unfortunately, by following these recommendations we have lost thousands of Brazilians,  ”he said. He recalled that the Ministry of Health today advocated an "  early treatment  " with a set of drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, which divides the world scientific community.

( with AFP )

Read also : Latin America, the new epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic

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  • Brazil
  • Coronavirus
  • Jair Bolsonaro
  • Health and Medicine

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