Coronavirus: Hard-hit Brazil removes data amid rising death toll

As just one example, he created a 'culture minister' position and his first choice for the position promptly recorded a speech cribbing Joseph Goebbels (no joke). https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bolsonaro-under-fire-dis...

There's plenty more if you dig. Hard to pick a more awful human being.

See the whole climate change inaction. Which is basically a pandemic that we DO have a warning for, years and years in advance.

It's getting even worse now in my country because the media got tired of Covid and switched to BLM. Making the virus feel even more distant and invisible.

This is normal; HN is a technical oriented community of people who know how and where to look for information, then able to dismiss the usual bullshit. It's very unlikely we'll find a Covid-19 negationist or a flat earther over here, for example. Just nitpicking, I got your point and agree with it.

Really? If anything I'd think HN of all places should be used to this class of problem, because it's endemic in much of tech particularly IT/devops, and we have arguably one of the more recent biggest and most well known cases of it ever: the Y2K effort. That was a massive industry wide problem that, in a rare case, also got significant media attention. And it was solved thanks to an utterly enormous level of effort. Hundreds of thousands if not millions or more of man years were put into going through decades of by definition crufty-as-hell code that maybe nobody had looked at in ages or had any recent mental model of and hunting for and fixing date issues. Sometimes permanently, sometimes through delay hacks ("let's consider 00-20 to be the 2000s, 30-99 to be the 90s" for example). Then there had to be lots of testing and dry runs leading up to the switch. And it mostly worked! There really were major problems, but they mostly came up in testing. The deadline was hit, it was a huge success. And the public result? It became the butt of jokes and a "cautionary story in overhyping a nothing burger" etc for the next decade at least. The general takeaway for the public seemed to be not "we solved this potential catastrophe thanks for a huge effort" but "we spent a ton of money and time and worry over something that didn't do anything!"

The basic issue of problems where the success scenario is essentially "nothing happens" but the failure scenario is huge costs is definitely hard to square with human psychology. Prediction vs reaction requires expertise in the subject that of course not everyone can possibly have, which in turn means non-experts must be able to identify and trust actual experts and institutions, with all the fuzziness and further issues that can bring. Arguably the ideal for Security, IT, ops, health, and many other areas is that they're mostly like air: noticeable primarily in their absence or degradation. If it's a particularly nice day and environment and the air is extra fresh we might take note of that as we first encounter it, and perhaps reflect at times how we feel more energized and clear headed then normal, but it's human nature to quickly let that fade into the background, and a significant amount of pollution or quality degradation is also something that can become omnipresent and looked over if it's not to the level of actual pain/breathing issues.

I don't know if there is any real formula for that beyond the hard work of institution building, with trust hard to gain and taking long time periods but fairly easily squandered. Even that may not be enough in the face of short term expediency and profit. Experiences like being treated as a cost-center and screaming into the void about security threats that we can see coming down the track from ages away and know have the risk of major costs are probably all too common here :(.

It's visible in most countries I followed, as soon as the fear that is purported by the governments and the media takes root the numbers start to drop earlier than they should given the lockdown measures.

Simply because many of the social distancing measures are adopted by the populace as soon as fear spreads.

Apart from that the Health Ministry is hiding the numbers for acute respiratory syndrome deaths (which could be seasonally-adjusted and an inference to CoViD-19 deaths be made).

He might be an alarmist but models all around the world are wrong and being updated constantly to keep on track with reality, you can't say that to dismiss all the information he's shared because of a missed prediction/projection.

> Citing total number of cases in Brazil is disingenuous in my opinion because the country has one of the largest populations in the world.

Nothing that involves exponential growth should disregard total numbers, the growth of total numbers is explosive. Total population doesn't matter as it's barely the upper bound limit of total number of cases a given region might get, how the numbers are accruing towards this total is the most important information and the only way to keep track of that is by keeping track of the total cases. It doesn't matter that Brazil has a low ratio of deaths/million if the cases are still growing exponentially as deaths will always lag behind.

Brazil's curve is accelerating, numbers are severely underreported, I heard the same kind of talking points in early March around death rates, etc. and the situation has steadily got worse by the day. Trying to paint a better picture by selecting a ratio-based metric doesn't seem to be the way to analyse Brazil's current situation, it's worsening and measures against the spread are being haphazardly removed or fought against by the Federal Government, it's a brewing disaster.

some feedback:

>there is no tradeoff between saving lives (due to COVID-19) and reducing widespread economic damage

It is easy to show that there is no tradeoff by assuming that economic damage is only dependend on the duration of the lockdown. Why not aim for R=0? This would save even more lives and reduce the duration of the lockdown to what? 3 weeks? It will just stop all economic activity for 3 weeks. More severe policies have a greater impact on economy. And my intuition is that this dependency is non-liniar. Each reduction of R by 0.1 could for example double(?) the damage to economy. I only skimmed your article [1] - so maybe you already addressed this?

>Counterintuitively, the policy frontier (economic vs human damage) is concave and non-monotonic, and has three distinct regions.

Not surprising at all. I think the right hand side negative slope region of the policy curve is the herd immunity strategy (at least I call it so). It was discussed (and rejected) months ago.

I mean, the guy is normally batshit crazy and I expected him to blame Gates and Soros for the virus... but his response so far has been surprisingly good.

He doesn't fit because he's more incompetent, more corrupt, more egocentric, emptier of any moral values, more oblivious to the interests of his co-citizens, than any other political leader ever was (in Brazil and elsewhere), right?

We're also severely under-tested. Given our fickle social distancing and isolation, I highly doubt we "only" have 600K infected people. Our flagship universities (USP, UERJ) have already estimated that the real number can be up to 16 times higher.

The population is encouraged to reach out to the health service only when they have the most severe symptoms, since the public health service is at the edge of collapse in many states. The number of people dying at home, and dying from severe respiratory syndrome is abnormally high. It all adds up to an even grimier picture.

About our governors and mayors, I personally think most of them are doing what they possibly can do. They're facing an immense pressure to roll back lock-down measures in order to "save the economy" partly because of the finance minister's catastrophic failure. Businesses had a hard time getting credit, and the people in need were left scrambling for that ridiculous $120/month benefit.

We're living in a failed state.

I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. (Living in Germany, I do trust Angela Merkel that much, for example. I want that for everyone.)

I don't think that's true at all, I've never seen anything like that downvoted here. HN seems to be a generally well-educated, scientifically-minded crowd.

Please post, por favor!

Not anymore, now that Bolsonaro has fired two (!) health ministers and put a worthless yes-man in charge.

And we thought it was bad enough when he fired the first health minister to put a yes-man in his place. It turned out that the first yes-man wasn't spineless enough for Bolsonaro so he also got fired.

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/Europe_Deaths_linear.png

I wouldn't trust the last week of numbers at all. It takes time to notarize the deaths, and time to consolidate the numbers. Also don't trust within week distribution, because the deaths aren't reported at the same day they happen.

Overall, this is a reliable number. It's mostly impossible to hide a death in Brazil, there are way too many different actors watching those. And this is a paragovernamental organization (think about the US FED) that has all interest on not be caught by the public doing a bad job.