The Blockade only lasted four days. This Monday morning, the President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro announced that it plans to publish in the future, but again, detailed data on the development of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.
as recently as last Friday, the Brazilian health Ministry stated, to publish only newly registered infections, recoveries, and deaths. The breakdown by States, as well as the sum of the Numbers since the first COVID-19 infection in the country no longer appeared.
in Addition, had postponed the publication of the data in the evening, the last one on 22 at. This practice will be retained according to the President Bolsonaro. The reason is that The Figures should no longer be in the evening news announced.
Also in the count of deaths if you wanted to specify only the those who had died in the past 24 hours, and which at the same day COVID-19 the cause of death was confirmed had been. This means that If the confirmation of the death comes the cause later, and this is not rare, the victim in the daily statistics.
Authoritarian tendencies
According to a report in the newspaper “Valor Econômico” pressed military in leading positions of the Ministry of health, the new assessment method. “Such methods,” says Oliver Read, a political scientist at the University of Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), “are typical of countries with authoritarian tendencies, such as Russia and Venezuela”.
The Blockade strategy of the Brazilian government not only triggered protests in the civil society, but also called on the Federal States to the Plan. The President, with many States in the Clinch, imposed in the fight against the pandemic, much more stringent restrictions than it is to the President in love.
to publish the National Council of health secretaries (CONASS), announced the data in future. So far, he had sent the Numbers from the States to the Ministry of health in Brasilia for publication. CONASS-President Alberto Beltrame, said: “The authoritarian, insensitive, inhumane, and unethical attempt to make the COVID-19-dead invisible, it will fail.”
confusion and Manipulation
The wind of the health secretaries of the trigger could have been that the government has performed u-turn, says FGV-Analyst Read: “Bolsonaro had to worry about that any more consult the website of the Ministry of health, and him in control of the debate would be slipping away.”
Read believed that “Bolsonaro tried to disguise the extent of the crisis, because he is in the polls”. He use the Numbers to his tactic of polarization to advance, “He says in the principle: Everyone has the right to his own data.”
similarly, the Brazilian Economist Filipe camp ante by the US Johns Hopkins University, sees it: “Presumably, the government wants to convince anybody serious about of your Numbers. It’s probably about to cause General confusion, so people will disengage at some point frustrated.”
International Isolation
This behavior could have catastrophic effects on the Brazilian foreign policy, believed Bruno Brandão, an Economist and a foreign expert of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais: “The suppression and Manipulation of information has jeopardised the credibility of a country in the international community.” The approach of the OECD and the negotiations of trade agreements with Mercosur and the European Union were at risk of acute.
Bolsonaro seems to take the risk of international Isolation in the purchase. Last weekend, he announced, to follow the example of US President Donald Trump and his country’s membership in the world health organization (WHO) to terminate. Brandao: “it would be a further step to isolate Brazil, and to make a pariah of the international community.”
author: Jan D. Walter, Bruno Lupion
*The post “Brazil’s battle for the Corona-Numbers” published by Deutsche Welle. Contact with the executives here.
Deutsche Welle
