How Similar Leadership Styles in the U.S. and Brazil Helped Make Them the Epicenters of Coronavirus in the Americas

Brazil just surpassed China both in confirmed Coronavirus cases, 105,222, and in deaths, 7,288, earning it the new status as the epicenter of the pandemic in the developing world.

When asked about these record numbers by a reporter, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s responded: “So what? I’m sorry. What do you expect me to do?”

Bolsonaro’s callous response and dismissive attitude about the gravity of the crisis has the familiar tone of the United States’ federal response. The administrations of both countries also have a tendency to silence dissenting voices. For instance, President Bolsonaro’s recent firing of his health minister for urging strict social distancing mirrors the Trump Administration’s demotion of Dr. Rick Bright for criticizing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial medication whose effectiveness against Covid-19 is still debated among medical experts.

The similar spikes in the U.S. and Brazil are no coincidence. The dismissiveness by the leadership in both countries has led to a lack of a coordinated nationwide response and significant inconsistency among state and local municipalities. Just like the U.S.’s state-led pandemic response is largely based on party affiliation in the U.S., many Brazilian governors and mayors have enacted stay-at-home policies despite Mr. Bolsonaro’s opposition.

In Brazil, rampant poverty and the lack of health facilities and infrastructure in remote areas like the Amazon have caused the pandemic to impact both wealthier large cities and rural outposts. Near the Amazonian city of Manaus, for example, hospitals are inundated and people in more rural surroundings must wait days to be transported to city hospitals, oftentimes too late.

Rio de Janeiro is also suffering a severe crisis. In Rio state, the waiting list for an ICU bed or a respirator is 360 patients long, state health secretary Edmar Santos recently told Globo television network.

“We are on the verge of collapse,” he said. “We will quickly see chaos, not just in Rio de Janeiro, but in all of Brazil.”

In stark contrast to Brazil, neighboring Argentina has been largely spared by the full force of the virus. Argentina, one of the first countries to impose a nationwide lockdown in March, has had just under 300 Covid-19 deaths. The same is true for other countries that followed Argentina’s early lead, including Colombia with around 400 and Chile around 300. Per capita, the coronavirus has proven 40 times more deadly in the US than in Argentina, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In a prior article about Covid-19 in Venezuela, we wrote about how the mass border closures were exacerbating the country’s refugee crisis, with many desperate people unable to leave and others abroad forced to return to Maduro’s mess because of lack of work. Brazil’s crisis is now forcing neighboring states that take extreme measures to prevent Brazilians from entering. In Paraguay, soldiers dug a trench along a road entering from Brazil to discourage Brazilians from walking across the border and spreading the virus, the Associated Press reported.

“Brazil worries me a lot,” Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández recently told reporters, citing the traffic flow from São Paulo.

Benjamin Gedan, the deputy director of the Latin America Program at the Wilson Center, told Wired Magazine that the ripple effect of nationwide lockdowns across Latin America (with the exception of Brazil) was probably a result of Argentina moving from no restrictions to a full national lockdown within a single week. “To have a country of the size of Argentina making the decision to take early and aggressive action made it easier for other heads of states to act responsibly, even at the cost of what was sure to be tremendous economic suffering,” he said.

Despite the success of countries like Argentina in flattening the curve, the country cannot avoid the “tremendous economic suffering” Gedan references. The country is now headed for its 9th foreign debt default, as reported by Reuters.

Like in Ecuador, which we wrote about in a prior article, the virus has also exacerbated and highlighted a variety of preexisting problems that have been mounting in recent years. In the case of Argentina, had it not taken any measures or been less aggressive, it could have been a catastrophe for the country with a shaky healthcare system and a historically fragile economy. Like in the U.S., Argentina has a wide patchwork of healthcare. About 10 percent of the population concentrated in large cities like Buenos Aires purchase their own insurance outright. This allows access to private hospitals with the best physicians in the country. About a third of the population—mostly the rural poor—receives care through a network of underfunded, understaffed public hospitals. The remaining majority of Argentines get health insurance through workers’ unions, each of the over 300 unions providing different benefits to its constituents.

The current President, Alberto Fernandez, just took office last December on a mandate to reverse the austerity policies of his predecessor Mauricio Macri that had failed to reign in debt and inflation.

“During this long period of austerity, there was less investment in health care structures,” says Benjamin Gedan, the deputy director of the Latin America Program at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan global policy think tank. “It was inadequate to meet public demand even before this pandemic. And now the government is locked out of capital markets because of its debt crisis. All of that makes Argentina particularly fragile to a public health crisis.”

This trend is unfortunately playing out across the entire region that was already facing worsening economic conditions before the pandemic struck. This is true whether or not countries have imposed strict nationwide lockdowns. Whereas Argentina is on the brink of default, Brazil’s slow response has not necessarily resulted in a tradeoff of necessarily better economic conditions.

There is still so much uncertainty as to how the virus will play out even in stable countries like the United States. It is clear that Latin America is in for a particularly rough road. Our hope is that because the pandemic has highlighted a variety of shortcomings with leadership and the political status quo, people in Latin America and beyond will have much less tolerance for incompetence and arrogance by their elected officials.

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Sources

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-sweeps-across-brazil-a-land-ill-equipped-to-fight-it-11588603847

https://www.wired.com/story/how-argentinas-strict-covid-19-lockdown-saved-lives/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/rick-bright-trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus.html