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.