Coronavirus Outbreak – The Lesson We must Learn from Brazil

Brazil has been the epicenter of the South American coronavirus outbreak. Lately, it has been a heart-breaking saga, to say the least.

Brazil is in the Southern Hemisphere so autumn (3/20 to 6/20) is in full swing there. At the end of the summer on 3/19, Brazil had a mere 621 cases and 7 deaths so the world was not paying much importance to its outbreak, remaining more or less fixated on a handful of European countries, the-then-epicenter of the outbreak.

Unfortunately, the picture went upside down with the advent of autumn. Being aided by the onset of the autumn flu season, the outbreak got a massive lifeline, pushing the caseload from 621 to 233,142, in literally less than two months.    

The shortened table above shows how the total cases skyrocketed from 6,836 to 233,142 in just six weeks. During the same period, the death tolls went from 240 to 15,633, a horrific 6400% growth. Both growth rates have been accelerating in May. In last three days alone, the daily averages grew by 14,723 and 828, respectively.

The regression graph reveals a perfect collinearity between the total number of cases and the resulting death tolls. This perfect relationship also provides a silver lining in mitigating its death tolls. 

Brazil, thus far, has a much worse record of per capita testing (3,462) vis-a-vis Chile (19,035) and Peru (19,767), the other hard-hit countries in the continent. Likewise, while Brazil has a death rate of 6.71%, Chile and Peru have 1.03% and 2.87%, respectively. 

Following in the footsteps of its continental neighbors, Brazil must intensify its proactive testing of the symptomatic population, promptly isolating the infected from the non-infected. The horror will continue if they remain reactive, meaning waiting for the sick to show up at the emergency rooms. The early detection is the key and they have to have more boots on the ground.    

Finally, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere must learn from the Brazil saga as it could be our forward scenario. We need to greatly increase testing before our flu season starts in October. 

Stay safe!

Data Sources: 
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Brazil

-Sid Som
homequant@gmail.com