Fernando Alcoforado*
Many rulers in the world regard the fight against Coronavirus as a war against an invisible enemy. The indispensable condition for a nation to win the war is to be united against the common enemy, the Corinavirus. In Brazil, this condition is not respected because whoever should lead the fight against Coronavirus, the President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, is opposing it by systematically disrespecting all restrictive measures on the gathering of people under the pretext that it is necessary to save, also, the Brazilian economy from debacle. In his action to compromise the fight against Coronavirus, Bolsonaro says that people must go back to work because Chloroquine cures the disease that is not proven by the WHO – World Health Organization and by scientists around the world. The fact that Bolsonaro assumes this attitude is encouraging a large number of people to leave the isolation in which they find themselves and return to the street as is already happening in several cities in Brazil. The end of many people’s social isolation is also related to the fact that they need to work to survive, given that the Bolsonaro government does not offer all Brazilians the necessary conditions for their survival.
In addition to acting to destroy the effort of governors and mayors to fight the Coronavirus, the Bolsonaro government does not act with the necessary urgency in the economic plan with the use of the financial resources it has to help vulnerable populations to fight hunger, companies in general not to be bankrupt and states and municipal governments to avoid their insolvency. All economic initiatives adopted to date have come from the National Congress. Brazil urgently needs strategic alignment in health actions with those of an economic nature, in order to facilitate the isolation of people to fight the Coronavirus. Total social isolation should only be replaced by partial isolation, as Bolsonaro suggests, in a second stage after which everything would return to normal in a third stage. This process should be implemented based on data that indicate a downward trend in the number of contaminated and killed by Coronavirus. As these numbers regress, the least affected areas should move to partial isolation followed by total clearance. In the third stage, to reactivate the Brazilian economy, massive public investments in public works and private investments facilitated by the government with the reduction of bank interest and tax burden should occur. This should be the rational process that would make health and economics compatible. The need for total social isolation is imperative in order not to collapse the health system in Brazil.
At least 2.8 billion people – representing more than a third of the world’s population – currently live under some kind of restriction of circulation to contain the rapid advance of Covid-19, a disease caused by the new coronavirus (Sars-Cov -2), points out a balance sheet by the agency France Presse (AFP). At a time when the pandemic is accelerating at an exponential rate, WHO advocates the physical isolation of people, despite its significant social and economic cost. Without aggressive action in all countries, millions could die, said the organization’s director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus. The rules of social isolation, which vary from country to country, aim to reduce the transmission time of the virus from person to person, giving governments time to equip and strengthen their health systems with equipment, expansion of beds, construction of hospitals and hiring health professionals and, above all, avoiding the collapse of health systems as occurred in Italy and Spain and may occur in the United States. The countries that have adopted social isolation are the following: China, South Korea, Taiwan, United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Italy, India, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Peru. In general , the restriction model depends on the degree of spread of the disease, the political context and the alignment with WHO recommendations. It usually starts with limitations of agglomerations, suspension of classes, advances with restrictions on circulation and, in the most extreme cases, even provides for a curfew and a fine for those who leave home.
Bolsonaro’s attitude in opposition to the total social isolation policy adopted in the vast majority of countries in the world and against the will of 76% of the Brazilian population in favor of this measure in a recent Data Folha survey, does not collaborate in overcoming the common enemy of Brazilian people, which is the Coronavirus. The fight against Corionavirus should be led by Bolsonaro, as President of the Republic, who, on the contrary, sabotages all necessary actions. In practice, the true commander in the war against the Coronavirus should follow the teachings of Sun Tzu, a great military strategist, who in his work The Art of War states that: 1) A leader leads by example, not by force. This is not the case with Bolsonaro because he does not set an example by exposing himself in public and the people he contacts, in addition to wanting to forcefully impose his will to end total social isolation through a decree that is prevented by the National Congress and the Judicial power; and, 2) The enlightened ruler establishes plans to follow, and the good general cultivates his resources. This is not the case with Bolsonaro who, as a ruler, does not establish plans to fight the Coronavirus and, on the contrary, acts to torpedo the plans of the Ministry of Health and of the governors and mayors.
In the article “How and when will this pandemic end?, published on the website <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/how-and-when-will-this-pandemic-end-we- asked-a-virologist />, Belgian virologist Guido Vanham, former head of virology at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, answered the following questions: how will this pandemic end? and what factors might it depend on? In this article there is synthetically the following:
1) It will probably never end, in the sense that this virus is clearly here to stay, unless we eradicate it. And the only way to eradicate this virus would be with a very effective vaccine that is delivered to every human being. We did this with smallpox, but that is the only example – and it took many years. So it will probably stay. It belongs to a family of viruses that we know – the coronaviruses – and one of the questions now is whether it will behave like other viruses.
2) We know that people develop antibodies. This has been clearly demonstrated in China, but we are still not sure how protective these antibodies are. There is still no convincing evidence that people who have recovered will fall ill again after a few days or weeks – so antibodies are probably at least partially protective. But how long will this protection last – is it a matter of months or years? Epidemiology in the future will depend on that – the level of protective immunity you get at the population level after this wave of infections, which we really cannot stop. We can mitigate it, we can flatten the curve, but we can’t really stop it, because at some point we will have to leave our homes again and go to work and study. Nobody really knows when that will be.
3) What are some of the factors at play? What do we know and what do we not know? The first thing we know is that it is a very infectious virus. But what is not known is the infectious dose – how many viruses you need to produce an infection – and that will be very difficult to know, unless we carry out experimental infections. The virus will run its course and there will be a certain level of immunity – but the answer to how long it will take will determine the periodicity and extent of the epidemics to come. Unless, of course, we find a way to block it in a year or more from now with an effective vaccine.
On the vaccine against Coronavirus, researchers from the United States and Germany are ahead in this race and with about 20 groups dedicated to finding an immunization against the disease. China has developed its first prototype and the Ministry of Defense has announced that the country is ready to start clinical trials on humans. Volunteers between 18 and 60 are being called in to test the vaccine. The United States, which started the first phase of its clinical trials the day before the Chinese announcement, is also pursuing a quick, effective and safe solution. The vaccine problem, however, does not end with the discovery. It is necessary to produce it on a large scale and distribute it to millions of people. No government believes that this can happen in less than twelve months.
Another promising news comes from Japan, where a drug called favipiravir, also known as Avigan, has been recommended by Chinese health officials because it speeds up the recovery of infected people. Those who received favipiravir were negative for the virus after an average of four days after becoming positive, while those who did not use the drug needed an average of eleven days to recover. Other drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, drugs that regulate the immune system in the face of infections, are considered harmful to health in the treatment of Coronavirus according to the opinion of highly qualified professors at Oxford University and Birmingham University. The widespread use of hydroxychloroquine exposes some patients to rare but potentially fatal damage, including severe skin reactions, fulminant liver failure and ventricular arrhythmias (especially when prescribed with azithromycin), says the article signed by Professor Robin Ferner of the Institute of Clinical Sciences from the University of Birmingham, and Jeffrey Aronson, from the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, UK. Vaccines and medicines can be the antidote to the pandemic. But that will not come anytime soon and what we have left for now, if we want to collaborate with society, is total social isolation. At this time, individual conduct may be more important in containing the plague than government actions.
From the above, it can be concluded that total social isolation is absolutely necessary at the moment in Brazil, that chloroquine is not yet proven as a drug capable of beating Coronavirus, that there is no vaccine capable of preventing people from the disease and that Brazil will not win the war against the virus if Bolsonaro’s will prevails. The future of Brazil is gloomy with the increase in people infected with Coronavirus and deaths of people from any type of disease and by the Coronavirus itself that will not be attended to due to the collapse of the Brazilian health system.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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