On Thursday, the Brazilian record of COVID-19 death has increased more than Italy.
After the U.N. agency warned Latin American Governments about not lifting lockdown due to the spread of coronavirus in the entire region, Brazil’s President,Jair Bolsonaro, threatened to withdraw Brazil from the World Health Organization.
Brazil’s President, Bolsonaro, is worried about how the economic costs are outweighing public health risks and argues to quickly lift the isolation orders.
Infection is spreading the most in Brazil and Mexico. These countries are seeing the highest rates of new infections. Further, it has spread in places such as Peru, Colombia, Chile and Bolivia.
There was a strict lockdown In March and April but continuing the same is not easy now and politicians want to open the economies as hunger and poverty is increasing.
Right now, more than 1.1 million Latin Americans have been infected.
According to the length of newspaper Folha de S.Paulo’s front page, the Brazilian daily highlighted that its been only 100 days that Bolsonaro described the virus as “killing a Brazilian per minute” as “a little flu.”
“While you were reading this, another Brazilian died from the coronavirus,” the newspaper said.
On Thursday, the Brazilian Health Ministry confirmed that there were more than 600,000 cases and 1,437 deaths in the country. These cases had been registered within 24 hours. On Friday night, Brazil had reported another 1,005 deaths. Further, Mexico reported 625 additional deaths.
When compared to the US and UK, this pandemic has killed more people in Brazil with more than 35,000 people losing their lives.
According to Margaret Harris, a spokeswoman from WHO said that a key criterion for lifting lockdowns was slowing transmission after she was asked about what were the efforts taken to loosen social distancing orders in Brazil even though there were a rise in death rates and diagnoses.
“The epidemic, the outbreak, in Latin America is deeply, deeply concerning,” she told a news conference in Geneva. Among six key criteria for easing quarantines, she said, “one of them is ideally having your transmission declining.”
Bolsonaro told journalists that Brazil would consider leaving WHO unless it is stopped to be a “partisan political organization.”
Similar to Bolsonaro’s views, President Trump, last month said that it would end its own relationship with the WHO blaming it of working according to China, where the virus spread first.
The politicians criticize Bolsonaro’sefforts to lift state quarantines by dismissing the coronavirus risks to public health. Some of them blame him for taking undue advantage of the crisis to undermine democratic institutions.
The ones who criticized the President are people who think about safety and effectiveness of anti-government demonstrations amidst the pandemic. Besides, last weekend, this situation was seen after there was a small protest between an overwhelming show of police force.
An epidemiologist and professor of public health at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Alfonso VallejosParás, said infections are high in Latin America as the virus failed to stop spreading.
“It is hard to estimate when the pace of infection will come down,” he said.
