The Guardian reports:

It was midway through February when André Machado realized Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe was racing into a bewildering and remorseless new phase. “The floodgates opened and the water came gushing out,” recalled the infectious disease specialist from the Our Lady of the Conception hospital in Porto Alegre, one of the largest cities in southern Brazil.

Since then, Machado’s hospital, like health centres up and down the country, has been engulfed by a deluge of jittery, gasping patients – many of them previously healthy and bafflingly young. Among the recent admissions was a heavily pregnant 37-year-old who was brought in complaining of breathing difficulties and a cough. Doctors performed an emergency C-section to deliver the baby in a desperate bid to take the pressure off the expectant mother’s Covid-racked lungs.

“We’re trying to help people but this disease is much faster and more aggressive than the tactics we’ve been using,” Machado, 44, said of his team’s efforts to keep pace with a tripling of admissions.

“It’s like we’re flogging a dead horse,” he said, before adding: “This disease is going to kill many more people in Brazil.”

At the end of last year Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro – a Donald Trump-worshiping populist who has gleefully sabotaged Covid containment efforts – declared his country had reached “the tail end” of what was already one of the world’s worst outbreaks.

Bolsonaro was wrong.

Three months later Latin America’s largest nation has lost almost 100,000 more lives – taking its total death toll to more than 275,000, second only to the US – and been plunged into the deadliest chapter of its 13-month epidemic.

This week, as a record 2,349 daily deaths were reported, the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva castigated Bolsonaro’s “moronic” handling of the crisis and urged citizens to confront their incompetent “blowhard” leader. “This country is in a state of utter tumult and confusion because there’s no government. I’ll repeat that: this country has no government,” Lula declared, blaming Bolsonaro’s “uncivilised” leadership and rejection of science for the scale of Brazil’s disaster.

“So, so many lives could have been saved,” Lula claimed, warning: “Covid is taking over the country.”

As the emergency intensified this week, frontline health workers from Porto Alegre to Recife, a coastal city 3,000km further north, described scenes of heartbreak, despair and exhaustion as intensive care units and cemeteries fill up like never before. [Continue reading…]