Brazil government halts daily virus updates as data befuddles experts

Brazil’s government has stopped publishing a running total of coronavirus deaths and infections within an extraordinary move that critics call an attempt to hide the real toll of the disease in Latin America’s major nation.

The Saturday move came after months of criticism from specialists saying Brazil’s statistics are woefully deficient, and in some cases manipulated, so that it may never be possible to get a genuine knowledge of the depth of the pandemic in the country.

Brazil’s last official numbers showed it had recorded over 34,000 deaths linked to the coronavirus, the third-highest number on the globe, just before Italy. It reported nearly 615,000 infections, putting it at the second-highest, behind the United States. Brazil, with about 210 million people, may be the globe’s seventh most populous nation.

On Friday, the federal Health Ministry took down a site that had showed daily, weekly and monthly figures on infections and deaths in Brazilian states. On Saturday, the website returned but the total amounts of infections for states and the nation were no more there. The site now shows only the numbers for the prior 24 hours.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro tweeted Saturday that disease totals are “not representative” of the country’s current situation.

A Bolsonaro ally contended to the newspaper O Globo that at least some states providing figures to the Health Ministry had sent falsified data, implying that these were exaggerating the toll. Carlos Wizard, a businessman likely to assume a high-level post in medical Ministry, said the federal government would be conducting an assessment designed to determine a “more accurate”′ toll.

“The number we've today is fanciful or manipulated,” Wizard said.

A council of state health secretaries said it could fight the changes by Bolsonaro, who has dismissed the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic and tried to thwart attempts to impose quarantines, curfews and social distancing, arguing those steps are causing more harm to the economy than the pandemic.

“The authoritarian, insensitive, inhumane and unethical try to make the COVID-19 deaths invisible will not prosper,” medical secretaries council said Saturday.

While precise counts of cases and deaths are problematic for governments worldwide, health researchers have already been saying for weeks a series of serious irregularities with Brazilian government statistics was so that it is impossible to get a handle on an exploding situation.

All over the world, coronavirus deaths are being undercounted to varying degrees due to lack of universal testing. Academic groups in dozens of nations have tried to figure out the magnitude of the undercount by studying the total number of deaths in a set period when compared to average of prior years in a particular nation, state, province or city. Where they find unexplained surges in deaths, it is likely due in large part to undiagnosed cases of the coronavirus.

In Brazil, such efforts by academics and other independent authorities have already been handicapped to an extreme degree by issues with the federal government statistics that serve as a baseline.

“It is extremely difficult to make predictions that you think are reliable,” said Fabio Mendes, an adjunct professor in software engineering at the federal University of Brasilia, who studies Brazilian coronavirus statistics. “We realize the numbers are bad.”

Towards the end of April, 42-year-old Leivane Bibiano da Silva became feverish, developed a bad, incessant cough and diarrhea - all symptoms of the brand new coronavirus that was devastating Manaus, the Brazilian Amazon’s most populous city.

Bibiano, who had HIV and tuberculosis, was scared of checking herself into Manaus’ overwhelmed hospitals, family relatives said. She died in her home about fourteen days later, and was buried in a mass grave at the general public cemetery. She was never tested.

“I’m upset, not merely about my mother, but about all those who didn’t enter the statistics,” said Leonardo Bibiano, her eldest son. “In all honesty, I don’t believe in the numbers.”

Brazil’s Health Ministry didn't react to queries about the experts’ allegations about problems with the data.

The gravity of the problems with Brazil’s data became clear last month when academics reviewing death certificates published by the federal Civil Registration office - which compiles death data from all Brazilian states - found drastic, unexplained fluctuations in the amount of monthly deaths recently, and puzzling discrepancies between states.

In Rio de Janeiro state, the quantity of average monthly deaths fell sharply starting in January 2019, a change the Civil Registration office said stemmed from its state court providing duplicate data for 2018 and previous years. The number of average monthly deaths in Manaus, the administrative centre of the northern state of Amazonas, a lot more than doubled when the shift occurred, that your office chalked up to delay in data submission.

On May 14, as independent investigators were questioning the inconsistencies, the Civil Registration office pulled a lot more than 500,000 death certificates from its website, saying most were from Rio and it had a need to review the way the figures were tallied nationwide to be able to ensure statistics were consistent year over year.

That made it practically impossible to create statistically significant analyses of excess death in Rio or Amazonas, two of the Brazilian states hit hardest by the coronavirus.

“Wow,” said Jesús Gómes-Gardeñes, an associate professor in physics and computational epidemiology at the University of Zaragoza, who has studied coronavirus statistics in his native Spain. “Half of a million is a hell of a whole lot.”

Another way to discover uncounted deaths from the virus is by looking at deaths related to other conditions, like pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency. In the lack of widespread testing, deaths from COVID-19, the disease due to the coronavirus, tend to be attributed to a number of of these conditions.

Brazil″s second most populous state, Minas Gerais, has recorded just 368 coronavirus deaths and has been praised for its handling of the pandemic. But data from Fiocruz, a widely respected, state-run biology research and development foundation, show deaths from serious acute respiratory infections in the state rose eightfold from 2019 to 2020, to 1 1,796.

In Rio, the full total number of deaths from pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency in the nine weeks through May 18 were 6,909 greater than in the same period this past year. But the federal Health Ministry’s COVID-19 death toll for the same period was 2,852 - not even half the suspected number.

ON, MAY 22, as media and independent researchers debated the discrepancy, the Civil Registration office’s number of pneumonia and respiratory insufficiency deaths in the state fell from 6,909 to 3,599. The office said it was because of reclassification of death certificates that list several related factors behind death.

Beyond the shifting and incomplete information, critics say, the Brazilian federal government has further eroded rely upon its count-keeping with cosmetic changes to official sites that appear made to de-emphasize the gravity of the epidemic.

One bulletin published by the president’s press office refers to patients in hospitals and intensive care units as “recovering,” even though a significant number eventually die of COVID-19.

“We are becoming a global joke in conditions of public health,” said Domingos Alves, a co-employee professor of social medicine at the University of Sao Paulo. “Deaths cannot be hidden by decree.”