Coronavirus: Brazil's Cases and Deaths Declining - Will It Last?

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I last looked into Brazil on June 20th. At the time, there was a prediction that COVID-19 deaths in Brazil would surpass the United States in raw numbers by July. Per Worldometer, that did not happen. Even now, Brazil has far fewer deaths (absolute numbers) than the United States. If you take a look at Worldometer's charts, case and death charts looks vastly different. In the United States, daily cases look to be on a rollercoaster that keeps on going up while Brazil appears to be sliding down. When it comes to daily deaths, the United States is somewhat flat since July while Brazil sloped up and then sloped down. Both countries have leaders (President Trump and President Bolsonaro) who are putting a greater priority on economics versus saving lives than many other countries. Why exactly are Brazil's daily cases and deaths trending better than in the United States? One thought that came to mind was that maybe Brazil was reducing their daily testing and so were having fewer reported cases. Per Our World in Data, that doesn't appear to be true. Yes, their daily testing numbers are very choppy, but they don't seem to be declining. If testing isn't the reason, then on the surface it does appear that Brazil is doing far better than the United States right now.

So let's see what is going on in the country. I couldn't find any articles that addressed my question about why Brazil currently appears to be doing so much better than the United States, but I did come across articles that indicated that Brazil might start seeing an uptick in cases again.

Foreign Policy (Oct 29) writes:

Until recently, it seemed as if the worst of the coronavirus pandemic was finally over in Manaus, a city of more than 2 million people in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon. As the number of COVID-19 cases slowed in June, authorities dismantled field hospitals. Bars and river beaches reopened soon after, drawing crowds of people out of isolation. In September, children went back to school, packing into cramped classrooms.

Those hopes were dashed in recent weeks as COVID-19 cases in the city spiked again among people who hadn’t been infected, triggering another round of restrictions as the mayor shut down the bars and beaches. João Hugo, a doctor who oversees a Manaus hospital, saw the number of patients climbing in early October. The critical care unit began to fill up as more people arrived with symptoms of COVID-19.

The article has similar reports on the northern state of Amapá and the city of Rio de Janeiro. Will these findings eventually start showing up in the reported data?

Al Jazeera (Oct 30) has some additional tidbits of info.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime critic of stay-at-home measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic, has said that it was “crazy” for countries to start locking down again to control second waves of the virus.

. . . Meanwhile, Brazil’s health regulator, Antonio Barra Torres, said he expects the country to have a vaccine against COVID-19 approved and ready for use in a national inoculation programme by June 2021.

Bolsonaro is still putting a priority on economics over lives. Also, it looks like they plan to start a vaccine program in June 2021. On Face the Nation (Oct 18), Dr. Scott Gottlieb seemed to imply that vaccines would start being administered in the United States starting around January. Perhaps the United States gets first crack at any vaccine as we've help fund the programs. If that is not the reason, there is an interesting 5 month gap there.     

Finally, per The Guardian (Oct 10) President Bolsonaro has gotten more popular in the country:

He sneered that self-isolating was “for the weak” and raged against lockdown measures. He clashed with state governors, and his own former health minister savaged his handling of the pandemic.

But as Brazil counts nearly 5 million Covid-19 cases and more than 147,000 dead, Bolsonaro is more popular than ever.

Like his idol Donald Trump, the populist Brazilian leader caught the virus and emerged apparently unscathed. But while the US president trails Joe Biden in the polls, Bolsonaro’s government has hit a record 40% approval rating.

Much of that popularity is down to monthly emergency aid payments of £83 ($108) – or £166 ($217) for single mothers – that about 67 million Brazilians began receiving in April.

Per Reuters (Sep 24), that was an increase from 29% in December. I bet President Trump wishes his job approval had increased by 11% instead of staying around the 45% mark. A jump to 55% would probably have guarantied his re-election.