Covid-19 is causing the collapse of Brazil’s national health service

Abstract

Brazil is one of the few countries in the Americas that has free universal healthcare. But years of neglect and the pandemic have left the system on the verge of collapse, writes Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade.

The burden of the pandemic on the non-SARS-CoV-2 emergencies: A multicenter study

“…One of the biggest fears of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was that COVID-19 would rapidly increase mortality due to non-SARS-CoV-2 emergencies with the collapse of health services due to COVID-19 [ 10 ]. The dramatic change in the emergency medical visit profile probably helped in some way to avoid an expressive increase in the mortality of non-SARS-CoV-2 emergencies.…”

Slump in Hospital Admissions for Stroke, a Fact of an Uncertain Nature That Requires Explanation

“…The severity of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a very important impact on the health system, in many cases leading to a situation of collapse [2]. It has been necessary to make very fast, deep and varying changes in hospitals, emergency systems and primary care, which have had side effects in other serious pathologies [9] and in those that are time-dependent [10,11].…”

“…In December 2019, the first identified cases of a new coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), in Wuhan, China, was followed a pandemic with cases reported in more than 200 countries [1]. The crisis is so severe that it could overwhelm the health care system in many countries [2], and depending on the local intensity of the epidemic, there is a high risk of not applying well-established therapies to patients with prevalent conditions such as cancer, acute myocardial infarction, or acute ischemic stroke [3][4][5].…”

The covid-19 yearbook: world leaders edition

“…Even when he himself caught the virus, Bolsonaro maintained his dismissal of it as “the little flu.” His blatant disregard for masks, social distancing, or any kind of preventive measures led to clashes with, and the eventual dismissal of, two health ministers in the space of three months, and it ran counter to regional governors’ attempts to get the world’s third largest outbreak under control. Brazil still suffers, particularly with an underfunded universal healthcare system,2 but Bolsonaro remains defiant: “All of us are going to die someday . .…”