My column for the Sunday spent in this Folha was a short list of the fallacies and absurdities about Covid-19 floating around like a tsunami of virtual seepage water. It was text for the printed newspaper, inevitably short – what fits in this room is only 3,500 characters, or a little more than a page of text in a simple room on your computer. I could only cover four subjects quickly. But of course there are millions of other things without a head or head being vomited on the internet by crazy, idiotic, ignorant and malicious people. That is why I will continue to address you punctually in short texts.
And without further ado, let’s go to the first.
They said the lockdown worked in European countries, but the death rates per 100,000 people are far worse than in Brazil. Also?
It’s a classic case of mistaking garlic for bells. Besides the fact that Europe’s population has a much higher proportion of older people than ours – and, as we should know, older people die much more often than young people – anyone who says this conveniently forgets the fact that cases and deaths, they collapsed after severe European lockdowns between March and May 2020. So much so that the continent resumed almost all of its activities in the months that followed.
And soon after, of course, it was a blow to the surge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from October onwards. Note that in the middle of last year some used the argument, “It was not the lockdown that broke the barn, it was herd immunity”. BALELA, very kind reader. The fact that we witnessed a European hecatomb in the last quarter of 2020 makes it very, very clear that there was no herd immunity – such as the protection of the general population thanks to the previous spread of the virus in it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have so many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
(At this point, anyone talking about herd immunity naturally induced by Sars-CoV-2 should be in jail for a public health crime. Kisses, Osmar TerraPlana!)
The only variable that could reduce transfers, hospitalizations and deaths in the European scenario was lockdown. Case closed. The European numbers took another turn for the worse, outperforming Brazil for one very, very simple reason: they relaxed too much and still didn’t have a vaccine.
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