Finally, Brazil gets sense! Maybe they could share some with us?


The NY Times reported this morning that a Brazilian Senate panel recommended yesterday that President Bolsonaro – and 77 other people, including three of his sons - be charged with nine crimes, including “crimes against humanity”. What did they do? They “(allowed) the coronavirus to spread unchecked through Brazil in a bid to reach herd immunity.”

Brazil has had 739,000 Covid deaths, compared to 757,000 in the US. However, on a per capita basis, Brazil is way ahead of the US in terms of deaths. But did either Brazil or the US get anywhere near herd immunity, even with vaccines? Nope. This is because the availability of vaccines has pushed up the level of “people with antibodies” (i.e. those who have either had Covid or been vaccinated, although having had Covid confers less immunity than vaccination) required for herd immunity, even though vaccines have reduced the absolute number of deaths from what they would have been with herd immunity and without vaccines.

Remember, there were people in high positions that were calling for the US to pursue herd immunity (remember Scott Atlas?) – meaning just let the virus run wild. Fortunately, we never quite got to that point, but Bolsonaro – who was always more popular in Brazil than Trump was/is here – got a lot further toward the goal. Suffice it to say we would have had millions of deaths if Trump had been even as successful as Bolsonaro in letting the coronavirus spread.

Of course, Trump used to say that he’d prevented millions of deaths, and that’s technically correct. But they were only prevented because he couldn’t get the government do what he wanted, whereas Bolsonaro could. Of course, Trump wants a second chance, and he’ll probably be a lot smarter then. Who knows how many deaths he could cause?

I’m not interested in finding out, of course.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, October 24.

Month

Deaths reported during month

Avg. deaths per day during period

Deaths as percentage of previous month’s

Month of March 2020

4,058

131

 

Month of April

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June

23,925

798

57%

Month of July

26,649

860

111%

Month of August

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept.

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct.

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov.

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec.

79,850

2,576

209%

Total 2020

354,215

1,154

 

Month of Jan. 2021

98,604

3,181

119%

Month of Feb.

68,918

2,461

70%

Month of March

37,945

1,224

55%

Month of April

24,323

811

64%

Month of May

19,843

661

82%

Month of June

10,544

351

53%

Month of July

8,833

287

84%

Month of August

31,160

1,005

351%

Month of Sept.

56,687

1,890

182%

Total Pandemic so far

757,841

1,257

 

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday: 757,841

Average daily deaths last seven days: 3,190

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 3,753

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 3.0%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 46,376,637

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 510,861 (=72,80/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 582,223 (= 83,175/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 1.1%  

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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