--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When it comes to COVID-19, no one does it worse than the United States. We've got 2 million confirmed cases and counting. We never fully shut down, but we're super into reopening. And now we're seeing huge COVID spikes all over the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Europe is considering reopening its borders, but banning Americans from traveling there. The border with Canada remains closed. Nobody wants to play in the sandbox with us because we are the worst. We're number one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But Brazil is catching up. And the similarities are astonishing. Never really shut down, check. A president recommending hydroxychloroquine, check. Concerns over healthcare infrastructure, check.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But unlike the United States, Brazil has the added risk that if things get really, really bad, the military might step in and take over. So long democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We got in touch with Gustavo Ribeiro to find out how close Brazil is to that desperate scenario.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: I'm a journalist, a political scientist, and I am in Sao Paulo. He runs the Brazilian Report. It's an English-language news site that covers Brazilian politics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We spoke just after Brazil hit a familiar-sounding milestone. Over 1 million people have been infected here. Over 50,000 people died. And that makes the pandemic the single deadliest event in Brazilian history. Of course, barring colonization and slavery.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: But it has already killed more people than our war against Paraguay in the 19th century, which lasted for six full years. And it has only been four months since the first case was confirmed here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are now confirming more cases per day on a seven-day average basis than any other country in the world. And that's despite Brazil having more than 100 million fewer people than the U.S.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: COVID-19 got to Brazil late in February and it was a disease of the rich because COVID-19 did not come from Asia to Brazil. It came from Europe. It came from wealthier Brazilians who were either doing business trips to northern Italy or having a vacation trip.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing is, a lot of people simply disregarded the coronavirus as a little flu getting their cue from our president, who has called it the sniffles.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: It was just a little cold, said Brazil's president, when the crisis started. So nobody was really concerned about the coronavirus at the beginning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we saw a lot of boss to housemaid transmission. And then the housemaid who would go back to her neighborhood and then, in fact, family members and members of her neighborhood.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: So the first case of a COVID-19 death in the state of Rio was very telling of that dynamic. It was a 63-year-old housemate who worked for a wealthy family in an upscale neighborhood in Rio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And her boss did not mention she had contracted the coronavirus. She infected the housemate.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: When the housemate started showing symptoms, she then took a two-hour taxi back to her home in a countryside town north of Rio. And since she was diabetic, she had a history of high blood pressure. She died in the following afternoon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gustavo, you live in the biggest city in South America. What's the COVID situation there?
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Sao Paulo is the Brazilian epicenter of the coronavirus. If we count the greater Sao Paulo area, 23, 25 million people. And we are seeing the disease spreading around lower income neighborhoods.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's why also it has become so much more deadly than it was at the beginning of the outbreak.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: At this homeless shelter in Sao Paulo the beds have been full since the start of the pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Any suspected of COVID is set aside in this room.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: For several weeks a team of nine medics from Doctors Without Borders has come to take their temperatures and identify cases.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some projections have that Sao Paulo alone could have up to 1.2 million cases, and now the virus is traveling through the countryside at a fast pace.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: But the first cities to see a healthcare collapse were in the Amazon states. When we talk about the Amazon states, we're not talking only about the indigenous or the native communities, but a lot of urban communities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We have a few urban centers there. Most cities there simply do not have an intensive care unit. Sometimes they don't even have hospitals.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: The mortality rate among Brazil's indigenous people is twice as high as other Brazilians.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The military has been sent in to help communities with testing. But some in the Amazon region say it's too late and accuse the president of abandoning them.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: A lot of people die before even realizing that they got the coronavirus and before having the opportunity to get treatment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then the fact that biologically, many of these communities, because they're so reclusive, because they have so little contact with urban populations, They're even less prepared.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: But when you get the map of the coronavirus spread and then you see the roads and the rivers, that explains you the path of the virus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because, for instance, river transportation is the number one transportation in the Amazon. And that means that a lot of people are close to each other in small boats, traveling for several hours often.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: And if one person is infected, we can have dozens of people leaving the boat carrying the virus as well. So that's how the virus spreads so quickly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then that's also the fact that these areas are extremely warm. Sometimes they live five, six, seven people in small shacks, and then you ask them to stay at home with 80% humidity and 35 degrees Celsius heat.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: So social distancing was very hard to implement in these areas, and it never really was followed by the population.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So that also helps explain why the coronavirus spread so quickly in the Amazon.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Bodies lie on hospital trolleys in the city of Manaus in the north, while doctors tell us the health system across the country is collapsing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We saw Manaus, which is the biggest city in the Amazon, it was the first to experience a full-scale collapse to the point that burial services, They were not prepared to dig as many graves and they didn't have enough coffins for everyone.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: They've buried hundreds upon hundreds here and they're ready for thousands more. This is just one cemetery where they're filling the graves as fast as they can dig them. Still not fast enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We are stuck in the worst of two worlds here. The economy is tanking as it is everywhere in the world. But the problem is we have a very informal economy, which means that tens of millions of people in Brazil, it's not that they live paycheck to paycheck. They have to go out every single day and make their living in order to have something to eat.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Fears of running out of food outweigh any fears from the coronavirus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In downtown Rio de Janeiro, the Flamengo football squad does the rounds twice a week. They have already distributed more than 600 meals.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: But as more months go by, the requests only increase. It's very hard for these people to simply stay home.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we are stuck in a place where people are still going outside and the virus is still spreading. We don't have a fully functioning economy, but we're not controlling the outbreak.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: It's really hard to blame COVID-19 on anyone, but in Brazil, it's pretty easy to point a finger at President Jair Bolsonaro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. That's after a quick break on Today Explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's talk about Jair Bolsonaro, huh?
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Oh, yeah. You cannot talk about the coronavirus in Brazil without talking about Jair Bolsonaro.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's really hard in this kind of situation to attribute blame to specific individuals, but I think it's safe to say that in Brazil's case, President Jair Bolsonaro might be the single biggest responsible for things getting so bad so quickly.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: From the get-go, he undermined the severity of the crisis, the lethality of the virus, he called it the sniffles, a little flu.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then there's this now infamous exchange last month when President Bolsonaro was asked about a record number of coronavirus deaths in Brazil.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: So what? I mourn the deaths? What do you want me to do? I can't perform miracles.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He said that we should by no means get into social isolation that should be reserved only for the elderly and for at-risk populations.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: He has incited insurrection from his supporters against governors who have enforced quarantine measures.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're here in support of our president, Jair Bolsonaro. We want to go back to work. We want support for shopkeepers, support for entrepreneurs.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: These people here in Sao Paulo today are in support of Brazil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he has joined protests and demonstrations against social isolations.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: He's openly disagreed with advice from his own health ministry, saying measures such as social distancing are costing jobs and are more dangerous than the virus itself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He has created social gatherings himself.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Sao Paulo's governor used to be an ally. It's amazing when you have two virus to combat, the coronavirus and Bolsonaro virus.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he has gotten rid of two health ministers amid a pandemic.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Wait a second, Gustavo, you guys don't have a health minister right now? Is that what you're saying?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's exactly what I'm saying.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Oh my gosh. We have an army general with no medical experience who is the interim health minister.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The number one strategy of the government to control the crisis was not to increase testing, was not to give money to people so people can afford to stay home, was simply to hide the numbers.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: So a couple of weeks ago, the official dashboard of the health ministry went off air. And for hours, we had absolutely no idea what had happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when it came back on air, it didn't bring the total tallies, just the new daily cases and deaths, which means hiding the true extent of the outbreak because people don't have the records to know, okay, if we have 10,000 new cases, how many cases we have in total.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: And it took the Supreme Court to intervene. So the Bolsonaro administration put the dashboard back in place. But the problem is that it has discredited the official data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So a recent poll showed that 70% of Brazilians do not trust the coronavirus data, 35% because they think it is understated, and 35%, which pretty much coincides with the president's base of support, thinks they are overstated.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: And meanwhile, 4% of Brazilians believe the coronavirus is not real at all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is to say that despite utterly failing to contain this in any way and literally mocking the pandemic, Jair Bolsonaro still has significant support in the country.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Significance is a big word. He is among democratically elected leaders in Brazil, the least popular one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, controlling one third of the electorate amid a pandemic with a job apocalypse that is going to strike us very soon, with the sheer amount of scandal his administration has faced over the past year it quite remarkable if you think of it
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: But with bankruptcies starting to rise in Brazil with businessmen being disgruntled for social isolation we have seen him losing support among wealthier classes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, the government has put in place a few months ago a $120 stipend for vulnerable populations. It isn't much, but for many people, it is more money in a month than they have ever seen.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: We have to remember that Brazil has 14 million people below the poverty line. So for these people, the government aid boosted Jair Bolsonaro's support among less educated and lower income voters.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as soon as the stipend is canceled, we should see Jair Bolsonaro's approval ratings plummeting very quickly.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Parallel to the coronavirus crisis, we are seeing multiple corruption investigations against the president and against his sons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the government is extremely cornered and it is a president under siege. under siege.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: It makes me think of Brazil's history of authoritarian rule, of military rule.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is the military backing Bolsonaro or are they watching him closely and ready to step in if this pandemic continues to grow out of control?
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Sean, this is the $1 million question.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not even during the military dictatorship did we have so many military officers in the executive branch?
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: A recent count had like 3,000 members of the three armed forces, so Navy, Air Force, and the army in the government.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Keeping their position ambiguous is what makes them so powerful in Brazil. Nobody goes against their interest in terms of military pensions, salaries.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: They are a very privileged class in Brazil. And because nobody actually knows where they're standing in terms of the respect towards democracy, that makes them very powerful actors in the political arena right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where do you see this ending up, Gustavo? I mean, the pandemic is the second worst anywhere in the world in Brazil, and we assume that all of the numbers have been underreported, undercounted.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: You've got a president who is continuing to just mock it and not even take it seriously. His support is eroding, and a financial crisis is all but certain.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How worried are you for Brazil?
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Politically, it's hard to predict what's going to happen. I mean, it's politics and it's Brazil, so anything can happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I do see things getting much worse for a longer time before we have a solution, because the president is not strong enough to impose his will on other branches of government, but he's not weak enough to simply be tossed aside by the political establishment.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: So we're going to see this tug-of-war continue for the foreseeable future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: However, on the pandemic side of things, I think it's safe to say that when we have a sanitary crisis spiraling out of control and we have an economic depression knocking on our doors, it's safe to say that we're heading towards a humanitarian crisis in Brazil.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: And that's fuel for social unrest and it would shock me if we don't see a deterioration of the social fabric.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm very scared of what kind of society will we have in the post-pandemic world. I'm really scared.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Gustavo, I wish you all the best and and we're hoping for the best for Brazil.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Macy's. Fall is right around the corner, and that means layering season is too. Macy's Fall Fashion Guide can help you get a pulse on all the latest trends and must-haves.
--:-- Gustavo Ribeiro: Try a romantic look with a sheer top from INC. Or mix it up with some fun textures, like a faux fur bomber jacket from Karl Lagerfeld Paris.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No matter your vibe you can explore the macy's fall fashion guide and find
