Bolsonaro would like to torture the numbers, but in the court of knowledge there is no pardon – 04/18/2021 – Celso Rocha de Barros

With the creation of the CPI, elderberry amateurs were quick to spawn lies to show that Bolsonaro’s management of the pandemic wasn’t so bad. Some are pure fiction (“Lulinha owns the Chinese vaccine factory”), and honestly, if you think so, you’re a sucker.

But some of the lies that CPI pollsters will tell are based on real data. What is always wrong are the things government officials try to say with this data.

For example, government officials like to say that the number of people vaccinated in Brazil is high, compared to the number of people in other countries. That’s right, but Bolsonaro has nothing to do with it: 80% of these vaccines are Coronavac vaccines, from Botantan de Doria, which Bolsonaro promised not to buy. Try to rearrange only with vaccines that Bolsonaro imported and see where we stand.

Note that when looking at the vaccines that are applied, polsonarists like to use absolute numbers (the number of vaccines vaccinated), not relative numbers (the percentage of the population vaccinated, which is much lower in Brazil than in other countries)

But when it comes to looking at death tolls, they prefer to use relative numbers (deaths per million, in general). It is no coincidence: in the absolute number of deaths, we are only behind the United States (which has 100 million people much more and more).

Let’s take a look next at the ranking of deaths per million, which is most apt for Bolsonaro. Even in that ranking, there are only 12 countries worse than us (we spent the US that day). Among them are countries much older than Brazil, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, and the sparsely populated (and also old) countries of Eastern Europe (in general, less than 10 million people).

Covid-19 has killed, especially in its original form, larger than very young people; Therefore, it is essential to take this into account when comparing countries.

On February 3, 2021, Correio Braziliense was published Published a study by researcher Marcus Hecksher, From Ipea, which calculated the probability of a citizen dying from Covid-19 in different countries, taking into account both the size of the country and the demographics (number of elderly people) of each.

Overall, according to the study, the chance of a Brazilian dying from Covid-19 is 3 to 4 times greater than the rest of the world. It was Hecacher’s study that caused Ipea researchers to be barred from discussing their research with the press without government permission.

In Hecksher’s ranking, Brazil featured only the best of 9 countries, the majority of them in Latin America. However, the study compares data from 2020. The explosion of deaths in Brazil in 2021 was much worse than it was last year.

It has been a month since Brazilians died of Covid-19 about 30% of those who died from the virus in the world. Brazil’s population represents only 2.7% of the world’s population. In international comparison, we should actually be much worse than we were in measuring the controlled study.

In any case, it is always important to look at the data from different sides, but there is no angle in which the Brazilian catastrophe in the epidemic does not seem enormous. The scale of this crime is a consensus among international researchers. Even for consistency, Bolsonaro wants to torture the data. But in the court of knowledge there is no pardon.

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