Brazil’s Pandemic Is Just Beginning
The hardest-hit country in Latin America is facing a “perfect storm,” as inequality collides with COVID-19.
The United States is clearly ground zero for the coronavirus outbreak at the moment, but the next one may already be emerging 4,500 miles south.
“Brazil is probably the next epicenter of the pandemic in the world,” Luciano Cesar Azevedo, a physician who has been spending his days and nights treating COVID-19 patients in intensive-care units in São Paulo, the country’s largest city, told me this week. “I think Brazil is going to get close to 100,000 deaths.” On the day we spoke, Azevedo noted that ICU beds in the city’s public health-care system were at 90 percent occupancy. He said Rio de Janeiro, whose health-care system is already seriously strained by the outbreak, could become Brazil’s New York.
Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins
