You know the conversation about the half-full or half-empty glass? That’s the way it is. Optimists prefer to believe that humanity will continue to improve: less disease, more income, fewer wars, more democracy, less ignorance, more science … Okay.
We produce oxygen on Mars, why. That is, a device built by women and men on board the Perseverance jeep separated the vital gas (O2) from the dominant carbon dioxide (CO2) in the thin Martian atmosphere – after NASA made a toy helicopter fly under the orange sky.
Alvissaras! Humans will be able to colonize the Red Planet and breathe the artificial air from cylinders that are now missing in India and have just disappeared from Manaus. Hundreds of poor people are suffocating on earth, but we will still find a way to populate Mars.
Until then, it is recommended that you let yourself be distracted by the fierce Covid-19 championship between the USA, Brazil and India. The most powerful country on this planet (no other) has grown again under the leadership of Donald Trump – only than in deaths from the coronavirus.
The Republican denialist’s triggering of the pandemic, coupled with initial regulatory failures and reluctance to restrict mobility, resulted in 32 million infected people (10% of the population). Since then there have been 570,000 deaths, as have American soldiers in two world wars combined and that of Vietnam.
It goes without saying that Brazil, under the command of Captain Jair Bolsonaro (without party or pity), will overtake the United States in the genocidal competition. We’re already at nearly 15 million cases discovered and 390,000 deaths apart from underreporting.
In Brazil, more people died from Covid in one year than from a heart attack or stroke. It doesn’t take long for the coronavirus to kill more than the sum of the two evils, the number one killer in the country, with 400,000 victims annually.
In reality, we have already left the Americans behind. Because our population is smaller than theirs – 220 million versus 330 million – we have more deaths per million people than them (1,800 x 1,700, in rounded figures). And we will still take the lead in absolute terms, wait and see.
However, India is quickly following on our trail. In a single day, it set the world record of 333,000 people contaminated in a single day, with 2,263 fatalities within 24 hours and a total of 187,000 deaths. Still way below Pindorama and Mexico, but escalating explosively.
There are 1.4 billion Indians, widespread underreporting, incomparably greater poverty and a precarious health system that SUS would shine like the halls of the Israelita Albert Einstein Hospital in São Paulo. The Covid pandemic is about to hit its worst, despite the fact that 3 million people have died worldwide.
Images of people dying without air are repeated in hospital corridors like in Manaus. Photos of mass burnings tremble more than hundreds of pits dug by tractors in the capital of the Amazon. New Dantesque scenes will rule the world in the days to come.
In the United States, counties and entire states like Louisiana are rejecting deliveries, followed by vaccines for Covid. Vaccines are wasted that would save the lives of wretched Indians, Mexicans and Brazilians because many Americans refuse to get vaccinated.
Yes, the glass is half full, yes – from bile.
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