Bolsonaro's opposition to social isolation policies in Brazil jeopardizes the country's ability to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Total social isolation is necessary to avoid overwhelming the health system, but Bolsonaro prioritizes the economy over health experts' recommendations. There is no vaccine yet, and while some drugs show promise, chloroquine is not proven effective. Brazil faces a grim future if Bolsonaro continues sabotaging isolation and the response leads to more infections and deaths.

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DARK FUTURE FOR BRAZIL IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORONAVIRUS
Fernando Alcoforado*
Many rulers in the world regard the fight against Coronavirus as a war against an invisible
enemy. The indispensable condition for a nation to win the war is to be united against the
common enemy, the Corinavirus. In Brazil, this condition is not respected because
whoever should lead the fight against Coronavirus, the President of the Republic, Jair
Bolsonaro, is opposing it by systematically disrespecting all restrictive measures on the
gathering of people under the pretext that it is necessary to save, also, the Brazilian
economy from debacle. In his action to compromise the fight against Coronavirus,
Bolsonaro says that people must go back to work because Chloroquine cures the disease
that is not proven by the WHO - World Health Organization and by scientists around the
world. The fact that Bolsonaro assumes this attitude is encouraging a large number of
people to leave the isolation in which they find themselves and return to the street as is
already happening in several cities in Brazil. The end of many people's social isolation is
also related to the fact that they need to work to survive, given that the Bolsonaro
government does not offer all Brazilians the necessary conditions for their survival.
In addition to acting to destroy the effort of governors and mayors to fight the
Coronavirus, the Bolsonaro government does not act with the necessary urgency in the
economic plan with the use of the financial resources it has to help vulnerable populations
to fight hunger, companies in general not to be bankrupt and states and municipal
governments to avoid their insolvency. All economic initiatives adopted to date have
come from the National Congress. Brazil urgently needs strategic alignment in health
actions with those of an economic nature, in order to facilitate the isolation of people to
fight the Coronavirus. Total social isolation should only be replaced by partial isolation,
as Bolsonaro suggests, in a second stage after which everything would return to normal
in a third stage. This process should be implemented based on data that indicate a
downward trend in the number of contaminated and killed by Coronavirus. As these
numbers regress, the least affected areas should move to partial isolation followed by total
clearance. In the third stage, to reactivate the Brazilian economy, massive public
investments in public works and private investments facilitated by the government with
the reduction of bank interest and tax burden should occur. This should be the rational
process that would make health and economics compatible. The need for total social
isolation is imperative in order not to collapse the health system in Brazil.
At least 2.8 billion people - representing more than a third of the world's population -
currently live under some kind of restriction of circulation to contain the rapid advance
of Covid-19, a disease caused by the new coronavirus (Sars-Cov -2), points out a balance
sheet by the agency France Presse (AFP). At a time when the pandemic is accelerating at
an exponential rate, WHO advocates the physical isolation of people, despite its
significant social and economic cost. Without aggressive action in all countries, millions
could die, said the organization's director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus. The rules of
social isolation, which vary from country to country, aim to reduce the transmission time
of the virus from person to person, giving governments time to equip and strengthen their
health systems with equipment, expansion of beds, construction of hospitals and hiring
health professionals and, above all, avoiding the collapse of health systems as occurred
in Italy and Spain and may occur in the United States. The countries that have adopted
social isolation are the following: China, South Korea, Taiwan, United States, Singapore,

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Hong Kong, France, Germany, Italy, India, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, Chile,
Argentina and Peru. In general , the restriction model depends on the degree of spread of
the disease, the political context and the alignment with WHO recommendations. It
usually starts with limitations of agglomerations, suspension of classes, advances with
restrictions on circulation and, in the most extreme cases, even provides for a curfew and
a fine for those who leave home.
Bolsonaro's attitude in opposition to the total social isolation policy adopted in the vast
majority of countries in the world and against the will of 76% of the Brazilian population
in favor of this measure in a recent Data Folha survey, does not collaborate in overcoming
the common enemy of Brazilian people, which is the Coronavirus. The fight against
Corionavirus should be led by Bolsonaro, as President of the Republic, who, on the
contrary, sabotages all necessary actions. In practice, the true commander in the war
against the Coronavirus should follow the teachings of Sun Tzu, a great military strategist,
who in his work The Art of War states that: 1) A leader leads by example, not by force.
This is not the case with Bolsonaro because he does not set an example by exposing
himself in public and the people he contacts, in addition to wanting to forcefully impose
his will to end total social isolation through a decree that is prevented by the National
Congress and the Judicial power; and, 2) The enlightened ruler establishes plans to follow,
and the good general cultivates his resources. This is not the case with Bolsonaro who, as
a ruler, does not establish plans to fight the Coronavirus and, on the contrary, acts to
torpedo the plans of the Ministry of Health and of the governors and mayors.
In the article “How and when will this pandemic end?, published on the website
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/how-and-when-will-this-pandemic-end-we-
asked-a-virologist />, Belgian virologist Guido Vanham, former head of virology at the
Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium, answered the following questions:
how will this pandemic end? and what factors might it depend on? In this article there is
synthetically the following:
1) It will probably never end, in the sense that this virus is clearly here to stay, unless we
eradicate it. And the only way to eradicate this virus would be with a very effective
vaccine that is delivered to every human being. We did this with smallpox, but that is the
only example - and it took many years. So it will probably stay. It belongs to a family of
viruses that we know - the coronaviruses - and one of the questions now is whether it will
behave like other viruses.
2) We know that people develop antibodies. This has been clearly demonstrated in China,
but we are still not sure how protective these antibodies are. There is still no convincing
evidence that people who have recovered will fall ill again after a few days or weeks - so
antibodies are probably at least partially protective. But how long will this protection last
- is it a matter of months or years? Epidemiology in the future will depend on that - the
level of protective immunity you get at the population level after this wave of infections,
which we really cannot stop. We can mitigate it, we can flatten the curve, but we can't
really stop it, because at some point we will have to leave our homes again and go to work
and study. Nobody really knows when that will be.
3) What are some of the factors at play? What do we know and what do we not know?
The first thing we know is that it is a very infectious virus. But what is not known is the
infectious dose - how many viruses you need to produce an infection - and that will be

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very difficult to know, unless we carry out experimental infections. The virus will run its
course and there will be a certain level of immunity - but the answer to how long it will
take will determine the periodicity and extent of the epidemics to come. Unless, of course,
we find a way to block it in a year or more from now with an effective vaccine.
On the vaccine against Coronavirus, researchers from the United States and Germany are
ahead in this race and with about 20 groups dedicated to finding an immunization against
the disease. China has developed its first prototype and the Ministry of Defense has
announced that the country is ready to start clinical trials on humans. Volunteers between
18 and 60 are being called in to test the vaccine. The United States, which started the first
phase of its clinical trials the day before the Chinese announcement, is also pursuing a
quick, effective and safe solution. The vaccine problem, however, does not end with the
discovery. It is necessary to produce it on a large scale and distribute it to millions of
people. No government believes that this can happen in less than twelve months.
Another promising news comes from Japan, where a drug called favipiravir, also known
as Avigan, has been recommended by Chinese health officials because it speeds up the
recovery of infected people. Those who received favipiravir were negative for the virus
after an average of four days after becoming positive, while those who did not use the
drug needed an average of eleven days to recover. Other drugs, chloroquine and
hydroxychloroquine, drugs that regulate the immune system in the face of infections, are
considered harmful to health in the treatment of Coronavirus according to the opinion of
highly qualified professors at Oxford University and Birmingham University. The
widespread use of hydroxychloroquine exposes some patients to rare but potentially fatal
damage, including severe skin reactions, fulminant liver failure and ventricular
arrhythmias (especially when prescribed with azithromycin), says the article signed by
Professor Robin Ferner of the Institute of Clinical Sciences from the University of
Birmingham, and Jeffrey Aronson, from the Department of Health Sciences at the
University of Oxford, UK. Vaccines and medicines can be the antidote to the pandemic.
But that will not come anytime soon and what we have left for now, if we want to
collaborate with society, is total social isolation. At this time, individual conduct may be
more important in containing the plague than government actions.
From the above, it can be concluded that total social isolation is absolutely necessary at
the moment in Brazil, that chloroquine is not yet proven as a drug capable of beating
Coronavirus, that there is no vaccine capable of preventing people from the disease and
that Brazil will not win the war against the virus if Bolsonaro's will prevails. The future
of Brazil is gloomy with the increase in people infected with Coronavirus and deaths of
people from any type of disease and by the Coronavirus itself that will not be attended to
due to the collapse of the Brazilian health system.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System,
member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional
Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of
strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the
books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem
Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os
condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de
Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora
Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos
na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social
Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG,
Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica,

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Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate
ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores
Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo
e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As
Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba,
2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua
convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro
para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).