Lula is wrong to say that Brazil is the first in the world in deaths from Covid

Brazil is the second country in the absolute number of deaths from Covid, but the seventh in the rate of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants worldwide.

In his inauguration speech at the National Congress this Sunday (1st), President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) stated that the country has the highest rate of deaths from Covid in relation to its population in the world.

“In no other country has the number of fatalities been so high in proportion to the population as in Brazil,” said Lula.

As of December 31, the country had recorded 693,941 deaths from Covid, which gives an index of around 32.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, while Peru has the highest relative rate, around 64.1. deaths per 100,000, according to data from Our World in Data, a platform that collects information from countries around the world on Covid and other sociodemographic indicators.

In the ranking of relative deaths, which considered only the 20 countries with more than 5 million inhabitants on the platform’s list, Peru is followed by Bulgaria (56.2), Hungary (48.6), Czech Republic (40.1) , Greece (33.5) and the United States (32.3).

When the total number of deaths from Covid is considered, the United States ranks first, with more than 1.09 million deaths, followed by Brazil and then India, with 530,705 deaths.

In the speech, President Lula also criticized the management of the pandemic by former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), which constitutes, in his view, a “genocide”.

“This [elevado número de mortes] it can only be explained by the criminal attitude of a denialist, obscurantist and insensitive government to life. Responsibility for this genocide must be investigated and must not go unpunished,” he said.

“What is up to us, at the moment, is to show solidarity with the relatives, parents, orphans, brothers and sisters of almost 700 thousand victims of the pandemic.”

Several studies in the country and abroad have pointed to what they call excess deaths from Covid, which represents an addition to the official number of deaths recorded by the disease. People consider that other deaths that may be directly or indirectly related to the pandemic should be added to the records.

This is because each country has a more or less known annual rate of deaths from different causes, which can be both infectious diseases and other illnesses, such as cancer, deaths in line for organ transplants, chronic diseases and others.

So the difference between that rate and the cumulative total of Covid deaths is what scientists call excess deaths. This means that an even higher contingent of deaths could be registered as related to the pandemic in the coming years, as these studies advance.

In the country, the expectation is that 800 thousand people have died since the beginning of the pandemic until December 2021, or about 170 thousand more than was officially registered.

With that, the country would have already exceeded the mark of 900 thousand dead by Covid until this Sunday.