A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to resume publishing complete COVID-19 statistics after moves to suppress such information prompted accusations of authoritarian skulduggery designed to cover up the crisis. According to a report in The Guardian, the Brazilian government sparked outrage last weekend by purging the Health Ministry website of historical data relating to the pandemic and announcing it would stop publishing the cumulative death toll or number of infections. Officials claimed the changes would help ‘refine’ official coronavirus data.
But critics attacked what they called an illiberal ruse to conceal the severity of the pandemic’s impact in Brazil, where more than 37,000 lives have been lost. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes reportedly gave Bolsonaro’s administration a 48-hour deadline to begin releasing the full figures again each day, after a legal challenge from two opposition parties.
In the absence of comprehensive official statistics, a coalition of major Brazilian news outlets published their own tally of the country’s total number of COVID-19 deaths and infections: 37 312 and 710 887 respectively. Only the US has recorded more cases.
Many key states in Brazil, including São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, are about to start partially reopening, contrary to the advice of many specialists.
[link url="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/judge-orders-bolsonaro-to-resume-publishing-brazil-covid-19-data?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other"]Full report in The Guardian[/link]