The Meaning of a Day Without the Dead – Front Line

On the long holiday dedicated to the memory of the dead, I took three shifts in the aforementioned emergency department, where serious cases are treated exclusively, among which I did not make a single diagnosis of Covid-19. The reality of the so-called front line is a biopsy of what happens in the world around, the entire city of São Paulo registered one death on the day of the dead. Then a spark of hope warmed me.

The sequence of positive news culminates on this November 8th, when for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, the epidemiological bulletin of the state of São Paulo did not record a single death. None. No deaths from coronaviruses.

Speaking of a hospital that needed to provide inpatient beds in the emergency room, where we have already spent more than a week with a patient awaiting a place in intensive care, where we intubated one person while others awaited the first appointment on ambulance stretchers, there is some encouragement. And this result is undoubtedly due to the advance of vaccination in São Paulo and Brazil.

Despite the leaders of denial who boycotted the immunization as they could, the arrival of vaccines was enough for the professionals of the Unified Health System to massively distribute and vaccinate the population. Thanks to these workers and to our people, whose heritage is the largest public immunization program in the world, here the reality overcame the WhatsApp groups and unofficial advertising, 94% of people said they wanted to get vaccinated.

It should be noted that it is possible that the number of deaths will be corrected in the coming days, but this record of a day without deaths in São Paulo must be celebrated and it means, above all, that vaccines save lives and give us expectations of overcoming the pandemic.

However, it should be noted that immunizing agents against Covid-19 are more effective to prevent serious cases and deaths than infections, and the so-called non-pharmacological measures, such as use of masks, room ventilation and limiting the number of people in events for Avoiding agglomerations are necessary to avoid the recrudescence observed in Europe, where countries with less vaccine coverage in the East are experiencing the worst moment of the pandemic both in number of cases and deaths, and in the West there is an explosion of cases with a smaller increase in deaths thanks the vaccines.

Those who at that time continue to carry out anti-vaccination propaganda, attacking life on a large scale, as well as those who allege individual reasons for refusing immunization that protects not only the individual but the whole community.

At this moment, it is possible and necessary to celebrate life, science, our much attacked SUS and its workers. But let’s not lose the horizon of care, nor forget that the uncontrolled pandemic in various parts of the world, anti-vaccination propaganda, and the unequal distribution of immunization agents – while 51% of the world population received at least one dose of vaccine against Covid-19, in low-income countries, this number drops to 4.2%, putting the whole of humanity at risk.

There will be things to come, but to overcome Covid-19 we need to overcome epidemics of individualism and misinformation. Let there be life!