Brazil stares into the abyss as Covid intensive care units fill up everywhere
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Problem is things sound much more alarming if you weren't aware of these things and media reports them all the time.
[1] https://www.itv.com/news/london/update/2014-12-19/ambulances...
https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...
And that's only after a very weak 2018/2019 flu seasons - with one of the lowest death spikes on record.
Sweden and many other Western countries also have many more elderly people in 2020 than in 2009:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/sweden/2020/
With there being about 20% more 80-84 year old men (prime death age and gender) in 2020 than in 2009.
Scientific research comparing Norway and Sweden concludes that basically COVID deaths in Sweden are mortality displacement from 2018/2019 and 2021: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v...
What's most interesting is why this pandemic has been so heavily politicised and publicised, almost precisely at the timing of the 2020 American election, as the American economy was booming, and with a major aftermath being that many of the world's wealthiest people are now even wealthier due to rampant money printing.
Back to Brazil specifically, the major factor here is obesity, which has increased to 19.5% of the population from just 13.7% a decade ago: https://www.statista.com/statistics/781305/share-adult-peopl...
The correct response to COVID should have been to limit sugar (for obesity), and coal and oil burning (for air pollution).
COVID is basically a once-a-decade flu variant, but our population is now much fatter, sicker, and older this decade.
As a comparison Denmark and Ireland have almost identical number of vaccinations and population, so it seems like Ireland is being way too cautious.
This is just untrue. Look at the excess mortality rates across various countries: https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
Without the lockdown (which kept hospitals from overflowing) we would have been looking at similar death rates to those in Ecuador/Bolivia/Peru where 69%/72%/97% more people died than usual last year (vs 19% in the US and 16% in Sweden.)
Only 15-20% of people in the US have been infected, and almost half a million excess deaths so far.
With the lockdown, weekly excess deaths have been double a bad influenza year in the Netherlands, https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/2/20-2999_article
The infection fatality rate for Covid-19 has been estimated at 10x that of seasonal flu. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201030/covid-19-infection-...
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
Please find us the total deaths for 2020 vs 2019 and 2018, for Brazil and other non-lockdown countries. The FT article cherry-picks the data, comparing inconsistent parts of the year. There's basically just too much noise when looking at weekly deaths.
because we locked down the country, twice. (now for a third time in 2021).
It's nonsensical to compare flu deaths (which we don't mitigate) to covid deaths, when we shut down social life for a good chunk of the year. The only people who are still in some sort of political or ideological mindset are people who make these comparisons.
How is the FT article cherry-picking? The numbers I referred to are in the section titled, "Death rates have climbed far above historical averages in many countries that have faced Covid-19 outbreaks". They show the total excess deaths since 100 confirmed cases for each country, approximately a year of data for each. These figures are simply the number of deaths from all causes recorded in each country.
From the FT data you can see that Brazil had 23% excess mortality over approximately a year of data. It didn't see the huge early spikes seen in Peru where seroprevalence studies estimate about 40% of people were infected in Lima: https://andina.pe/ingles/noticia-peru-nearly-4-million-peopl... I can't find directly comparable figures for Brazil, but in July in Rio de Janeiro (vs December, though Peru's big outbreak from those graphs was early on) it was around 4% rather than 40%.
If you Google around (and set the time frame to 2001-2019) you find a lot of press articles on overloaded ICU's, temporarily closed wards, patients stops, postponed surgery etc.
In most Western countries the health care system has been increasingly strained. And even a slightly worse flu than normal would inevitably have resulted in severe problems. Even without covid-19.