Brazil stops releasing Covid-19 death toll and
wipes data from official site
Government accused of totalitarianism and censorship
after Bolsonaro orders end to publication of numbers
Dom
Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sun 7 Jun
2020 18.40 BSTLast modified on Mon 8 Jun 2020 17.46 BST
The
Brazilian government has been accused of totalitarianism and censorship after
it stopped releasing its total numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths and wiped
an official site clean of swaths of data.
Health
ministry insiders told local media the move was ordered by far-right president,
Jair Bolsonaro, himself – and was met with widespread outrage in Brazil, one of
the world’s worst-hit Covid-19 hotspots, with more deaths than Italy and more
cases than Russia and the UK.
“The authoritarian,
insensitive, inhuman and unethical attempt to make those killed by Covid-19
invisible will not succeed. We and Brazilian society will not forget them, nor
the tragedy that befalls the nation,” said Alberto Beltrame, president of
Brazil’s national council of state health secretaries, in a statement.
Brazil
currently has the world’s second-highest number of cases, at 672,846, according
to the Johns Hopkins university site, and has overtaken Italy, with 35,930
deaths. Johns Hopkins removed Brazil from its global count on Saturday but
later reinstated it.
On Friday
night, Brazil’s government stopped releasing the cumulative numbers of
confirmed Covid-19 cases and obits in its daily bulletin and only supplied
daily numbers. A health ministry site was taken offline and returned on
Saturday without the total number of deaths and confirmed cases, as well as
numbers of cases under investigation and those that recovered. The death counts
were reported as 904 on Saturday, 1,005 on Friday and 1,473 on Thursday.
The move
was widely criticised across Brazilian society, with doctors, medical
associations and state governors attacking what they called an attempt to
control information. Federal prosecutors announced an investigation on Saturday
and gave the interim health minister 72 hours to explain the move, using the
Brazilian constitution and freedom of information law as justification.
“The
manipulation of statistics is a manoeuvre of totalitarian regimes,” tweeted
Gilmar Mendes, a supreme court judge. “The trick will not exempt responsibility
for the eventual genocide.” Rodrigo Maia, speaker of the lower house of
Congress, called for the data to be replaced for “transparency”.
“You can’t
face a pandemic without science, transparency and action,” Paulo Câmara,
governor of the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, posted on Instagram.
“Manipulation, omission and disrespect are the striking marks of authoritarian
administrations. But this won’t destroy the effort of the whole nation. We will
continue producing, systematising and releasing the data.”
Moves to
control Covid-19 numbers began earlier in the week. On Wednesday, the ministry
pushed back the release of its daily bulletin from 7pm to 10pm, after the
nightly television news. “That’s the end of Jornal Nacional reports,” Bolsonaro
said on Friday, referring to Brazil’s biggest TV news programme.
The data
was “adapted” because it did not “portray the moment the country is in”,
tweeted the president, who has flouted isolation measures, dismissing the
disease as a “little flu” and shrugging off Brazil’s rising death toll because,
he said, death was “everybody’s destiny”.
Health
ministry technicians told Brasília’s Correio Braziliense that “Bolsonaro
freaked out” and blamed the president for the decision to “misrepresent” the
numbers.
The country
currently has no health minister, having lost two since the pandemic began. The
acting health minister, Eduardo Pazuello, is an army general with no health
experience who has stuffed the ministry with military officers.
On Friday,
Carlos Wizard, a billionaire Mormon businessman with no health experience who
is taking over as secretary of science, technology and strategic supplies at
the health ministry, called the current data “fanciful or manipulated”.
“There are
many people dying for other causes and public managers, purely interested in
having bigger budgets for their towns, their states, were putting everybody as
Covid. We are revising these obits,” he told the O Globo newspaper. In fact,
health specialists have argued that there is widespread under-reporting of
cases and deaths in Brazil, in part due to a lack of testing.
“Only
someone who does not know the public health system could make this statement,”
André Longo, health secretary of Pernambuco state, told the Guardian. “It
stains the history of Brazilian public health.”
Doctors
across Brazil said the lack of information would hinder management of the
pandemic as cases moved from big cities into its vast interior. “How is a
manager going to reallocate resources and organise vacancies and transporting
the sick if they don’t have data?” said Guilherme Pivoto, an infectious
diseases specialist in Manaus, one of Brazil’s worst-hit cities.
Pressure on
hospitals in big cities like Manaus, Fortaleza and Rio de Janeiro has eased and
states like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have begun slowly allowing shops and
businesses to reopen.
But
managing that transition requires accurate and clear information, said Alberto
Chebabo, an infectious diseases specialist at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal
University hospital and vice-president of the Brazilian Society of Infectious
Diseases.
“We have
room in intensive care … but the hospital still has many patients,” he said.
“Many decisions are taken on basis of these numbers not just in Brazil, but in
whole world … It is an inadmissible lack of transparency.”
SUN JUN 7,
2020 / 7:53 PM BST
Brazil takes down COVID-19 data, hiding soaring
death toll
Ana Mano
SAO PAULO
(Reuters) - Brazil removed from public view months of data on its COVID-19
epidemic on Saturday, as President Jair Bolsonaro defended delays and changes
to official record-keeping of the world's second-largest coronavirus outbreak.
Brazil's
Health Ministry removed the data from a website that had documented the
epidemic over time and by state and municipality. The ministry also stopped
giving a total count of confirmed cases, which have shot past 672,000 – more
than anywhere outside the United States – or a total death toll, which passed
Italy this week, nearing 36,000 by Saturday.
"The
cumulative data ... does not reflect the moment the country is in,"
Bolsonaro said on Twitter, citing a note from the ministry. "Other actions
are underway to improve the reporting of cases and confirmation of
diagnoses."
Bolsonaro
has played down the dangers of the pandemic, replaced medical experts in the
Health Ministry with military officials and argued against state lockdowns to
fight the virus, hobbling the country's public health response.
Neither
Bolsonaro nor the ministry gave a reason for erasing most of the data on the
covid.saude.gov.br website, which had been a key public resource for tracking
the pandemic. The page was taken down on Friday and reloaded Saturday with a new
layout and just a fraction of the data, reflecting only deaths, cases and
recoveries within the last 24 hours.
Late on
Saturday, the ministry reported 27,075 new confirmed infections and 904 related
deaths since its Friday update.
The
government drew criticism this week for pushing back the release of its daily
tally, previously available around 5 p.m. but released in recent days near 10
p.m.
"Transparency
of information is a powerful instrument for combating the epidemic," wrote
Paulo Jeronimo de Sousa, head of the Brazilian Press Association, in a note
accusing the government of "trying to silence the press at this late
hour."
Asked by
journalists on Friday about the delayed release, Bolsonaro needled the nation's
most-watched news program, Jornal Nacional, which begins at 8:30 p.m.
"There
goes the story for Jornal Nacional," he joked, adding that the show
"likes to say Brazil has the record for deaths."
Brazil
reported more new cases and deaths from COVID-19 than any other country on four
consecutive days this week.
Bolsonaro
tweeted on Saturday that a later daily update would "avoid
undernotification and inconsistencies."
(Reporting
by Ana Mano in Sao Paulo; Editing by Brad Haynes, Matthew Lewis and Daniel
Wallis)
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