My last column was an attempt to debunk some sentences from the genocidal misinformation about Covid-19 that is repeated by the usual suspects across Brazil.
In this text, my aim is to continue to attack the foundations of this Tower of Babel of Lies and to challenge the kind reader to pursue a simple strategy: do the math. If people stop for a minute to add 2 + 2 to the right, the following spots will be dumped into a sulfur-smelling cloud.
1) 1.5 million people die in Brazil every year! What if we killed 300,000 from Covid-19? It seems that today you just die from it!
I am not even going to go into the merit of inhumanity and contempt for the lives of others that this type of argument makes.
Given these quiet conversations and the number of pandemics, all we need to know is this: is it normal for this number of people to die of an infectious disease within 12 months?
The answer is a clear no”. We had already turned this key decades ago. In terms of public health, the hallmark of modern societies like ours is the fact that most people die in old age from chronic diseases – cardiovascular problems, cancer, diabetes.
While diseases caused by viruses like AIDS and dengue are still frightening, the overall chance of dying from them is quite small. Recent years of data on mortality in Brazil confirm this general trend, showing around 350,000 deaths per year from cardiovascular disease and 250,000 from the various cancers.
This obviously means that the magnitude of mortality from Covid-19 is sufficient to rank the disease second among the causes of death in Brazil. All the other lung infections put together – a bag of cats with myriad different bacteria and viruses – killed around 80,000 people a year before the pandemic.
At this magnitude, at this speed, the deadly effect of a single pathogen in Brazil can only be compared with the devastating epidemics of the colonial era. Welcome, as my colleague Atila Iamarino wrote, in the 18th century. Incidentally, that brings us to the second insolence that I want to address here.
2) The virus needs to circulate for us to gain herd immunity.
A single word of the Portuguese language should be enough to bury this ruthless idea: Manaus. The second devastating wave in the capital Amazon at the beginning of 2021 devoured a population in which Sars-CoV-2 had already circulated left and right. The Manauaras appeared to have reached a level of previous contamination (around 60% of the population) that was able to protect most of the people.
That didn’t happen. In fact, the large number of cases of the first wave only served to create complacency among the authorities and the population and, thanks to the subdued multiplication of the pathogen, to create new and dangerous variants of the disease.
It is necessary to realize once and for all that we do not know enough about the virus to propose this type of dangerous hypothesis. Letting the disease circulate at will remains a recipe for turning Brazil into a slaughterhouse.
It turns out that people already know a safe and effective way to establish such herd immunity. It’s called vaccination. And the more it is combined with distance and masks, the faster it comes. It’s math – not the black magic “early treatment” henchmen want you to swallow. We are a family business.
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