Ride-hailing giant Uber launched a campaign giving out promo codes for Brazilian customers going to vaccination sites. Discounts will be worth BRL 30 (USD 5.60).

Initially, the promotion will only be carried out in Belo Horizonte — the capital city of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais — and multiple municipalities in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. Other regional capitals, such as Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and Salvador, are set to be next.

The promo codes will be handed out by health workers at selected clinics.

“We want to ensure that mobility is no longer an obstacle for anyone who wants to be vaccinated,” says the general director of Uber in Brazil, Claudia Woods. 

“Therefore, in addition to supporting governments, we are also supporting the Central Única das Favelas (Cufa) to allow the most vulnerable people to have a transport option to reach vaccination sites. At this time, our partnership with them is to identify senior citizens who are in [vaccine] priority groups so that we can offer them rides.”

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One of the main obstacles to contain the pandemic in Brazil is the country’s lack of testing data and contact tracing. But a second coronavirus wave sent Brazilians to drugstores in droves to purchase rapid tests, according to a survey by platform Farmácias App.

Covid-19 tests sold in December represent one-quarter of all tests sold in Brazil since the beginning of the pandemic. A previous peak happened in July 2020, when coronavirus curves reached their highest point on record.

“Peaks in sales of Covid-19 faithfully follow the trends of cases and deaths,” said Farmácias App marketing coordinator Renata Morais.

The southeastern region leads in the number of tests sold (61 percent of the total), followed by the South, with 21 percent. The Northeast region, currently facing a health collapse, makes up for only 4.5 percent of test sales.

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On Thursday, President Jair Bolsonaro talked about reviving the coronavirus emergency salary program, which expired after December 2020. Without going into detail, he said the new benefit could start being paid out in March and would last “for three, four months.”

In an event hosted by investment bank BTG Pactual, Economy Minister Paulo Guedes mentioned that the benefit could be set at “up to BRL 250” per month (USD 46) initially — before being lowered to BRL 200. However, he said that launching a rehashed program would depend on the recreation of the “War Budget,” that is, a parallel budget for coronavirus-related spending that remained in effect throughout 2020. Without it, the new benefits program would cause the government to breach fiscal responsibility laws.

A new emergency aid program is key to prevent Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration from spiraling into a full-scale political crisis. His Health Minister is already under investigation for claims of mishandling the pandemic and the opposition is mounting forces to open a congressional inquiry.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s poverty rate jumped from 4.5 percent in August to 12.8 percent in January — and the economy shows no signs of a speedy recovery. And that has impacted the president’s approval ratings, as a recent poll shows.

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After posting better-than-expected growth in December (0.64 percent), the Brazilian economy ended 2020 with an overall drop of 4.05 percent, according to the Economic Activity Index (IBC-Br), published by the Central Bank.

The index is seen as a predictor of official GDP data, which will only be confirmed in March.

If Central Bank numbers are indeed correct, this will mean that Brazil has surpassed expectations, despite the heavy recession. Markets foresaw a contraction of 4.5 percent last year. Still, the result would be worse than the 3.5-percent skid seen in 2016, during what was then the worst recession in Brazil’s history.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, the coronavirus spread was also a tale of inequality. Poorer populations — forced to break quarantines in order to go to work — were much more exposed than wealthier Brazilians. And data showed that black people were much more affected by the pandemic midway through 2020.

Now, the coronavirus appears to have penetrated all social classes and race groups in a similar manner. The findings come from the latest numbers of São Paulo’s serological study and were reported by newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.

This even spread of the virus is credited to the holiday season, when luxury resorts went about their business as usual — throwing lavish New Year’s Eve celebrations to thousands of revelers often disobeying social distancing rules and not using masks. 

Carnival starts on February 13, and many cities will use law enforcement to avoid similar scenes, as we explained in our Daily Briefing.

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Under formal investigation for his department’s alleged omission in avoiding the Manaus coronavirus crisis, Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello is currently speaking before the Senate, fielding questions about the government’s pandemic response.

As our Daily Briefing explained (for premium subscribers), this hearing is key to contain efforts by opposition parties to launch a congressional hearings committee to scrutinize the government’s handling of the pandemic.

Here are the main takeaways from the Health Minister in the Senate:

• The new coronavirus variant from Amazonas “appears” to be three times as contagious as previous variants — and the hope to contain the virus hinges on vaccine rollouts.
• Brazil has contracts to secure 100 million doses of the Chinese-made CoronaVac vaccine, produced locally by São Paulo’s Butantan Institute. Between 8 and 12 million doses will be manufactured per month.
• “We have 11 million doses that were distributed to states and municipalities and we are not stocking them.”
• Half of the population will be vaccinated by June, and the rest by year-end.

(This is a developing story)

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Brazil’s lower house approved a bill to make the act of cutting vaccination lines a felony, holding a penalty of one to three years in jail. Nationwide, there have been more than 3,000 reports of people taking vaccines before their turn. Programs around the country are currently reserved for health workers and senior citizens.

Lawmakers also passed a bill imposing penalties of up to five years in prison to anyone who destroys or tampers with vaccines and their inputs.

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The city of Rio de Janeiro is undergoing what is arguably its worst moment of the pandemic, surpassing São Paulo as the city with the highest absolute number of coronavirus deaths. To make things worse, Rio could run out of vaccines as early as February 13 — when senior citizens are expected to receive their second jabs.

City officials say a new batch of vaccines is scheduled to arrive on February 23 — dates, however, could change depending on the availability of inputs. So far, the state of Rio de Janeiro has received around 1 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, according to Health Ministry data.

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Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro told reporters on Thursday that the government’s coronavirus emergency salary program will make a return next month — but failed to inform how much beneficiaries can expect to receive. “It’s almost done, we still don’t know the value,” he said. “[It will last for] three to four months, because we’ve got to be fiscally responsible.”

Created in March 2020, the program gave monthly payments of BRL 600 (USD 111) to vulnerable populations. In September, the program was halved — and expired after December.

While the emergency salary was being paid, the number of severely impoverished people in the country fell to its lowest level in at least 16 years. Since the program expired, over 2 million Brazilians have fallen below the poverty line, leaving 13 percent of the Brazilian population with an income of no more than BRL 250 per month.

Economy Ministry officials are angling for the new benefit to be lowered to BRL 200 — and want to condition payments to participation in a government-backed initiative to reduce labor rights as a way to foster job creation.

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The Brazilian Health Ministry is preparing a proposal to a council of health officials from all 27 states to speed up Covid-19 vaccination in the northern state of Amazonas. The move comes as Amazonas experiences a surge of coronavirus cases and deaths — and local hospitals are suffering from a shortage of oxygen tanks.

In January, approximately 5 percent of a shipment of 2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, arriving from India, were sent to Amazonas as an attempt to curb the crisis. A total of 555,000 doses have been distributed so far — mainly to health workers and over 70s.

The state government of São Paulo suspended the shipment of 50,000 doses of the Chinese-made CoronaVac to Amazonas, due to the state’s “lack of control and planning” in its vaccination effort. Late in January, courts suspended immunizations following multiple reports of officials and wealthy business owners cutting in line. The shipment will be sent after a statewide plan is elaborated. 

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The government in Guatemala announced that negotiations for the purchase of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine “have advanced” and that the immunizer could arrive in the country next month.

With 6,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths and 164,000 infections, Guatemala has yet to begin vaccinating its citizens. Besides Sputnik V, the country is awaiting 400,000 doses from the UN-backed COVAX facility, planning to distribute them to 135,000 health professionals at the beginning of March.

President Alejandro Giammattei said his government is also attending meetings with representatives from AstraZeneca. The plan is to vaccinate half of the country’s 17-million population by June. 

Vaccination in Latin America

On February 3, Nicaragua became the sixth country to authorize the emergency use of Sputnik V. However, only Argentina, Bolivia and Mexico have used the vaccine so far, while Paraguay and Venezuela await shipments. According to scientific journal The Lancet, the Russian-developed vaccine has 91.6-percent efficacy against the coronavirus. 

Of the region’s 20 countries — not including the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico — ten have begun vaccination programs. The majority have used the Pfizer vaccine, with the exception of Brazil (Sinovac), Peru (Sinopharm), and Argentina and Bolivia (Sputnik V).

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The Brazilian services sector crumbled 7.8 percent last year in what was its worst performance since records began in 2012. Pandemic-related restrictions crushed service segments that relied on the in-person economy, making it one of the areas worst hit by the coronavirus crisis. 

The results for 2020 came in even lower than the 5-percent plunge suffered in 2016, when Brazil was in the middle of what was its worst recession in history at the time, set to be bested by the current crisis. 

Unsurprisingly, the segments that suffered the most were those that are overly reliant on in-person activities, such as services to families (-35.6 percent) — which includes tourism, restaurants, and education services — professional and administrative services (-11.4 percent), and transportation (-7.7 percent). 

The only category that posted positive results in 2020 was the so-called “other services” segment (+6.7 percent), including financial services such as brokerages and stocks markets. It is believed Brazil’s lower benchmark interest rates contributed to growth in this area.

Doctors and health workers in the Bolivian region of Santa Cruz — the worst-affected by the pandemic — have called a 48-hour strike if state authorities refuse to impose quarantine restrictions to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s biggest and most populous area, concentrating around half of the country’s 10,929 confirmed Covid-19 deaths. Recent reports say that Santa Cruz alone had 685 new cases on February 9, more than twice as many as capital La Paz. 

Out of the country’s 230,000 confirmed cases, Santa Cruz accounts for 80,000.

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Arrested for breaking curfew regulations, 26-year-old Honduran nursing student Keyla Martínez died in her cell. She was arrested in the community of La Esperanza, just 150 kilometers from the capital Tegucigalpa.

A police report said Ms. Martínez committed suicide, but forensic experts say she choked to death. The news sparked a wave of protests in Honduras and raised questions about how many Latin American governments are using brutal ways to enforce isolation measures.

In countries such as Venezuela, El Salvador, and Paraguay, governments have gone about enforcing repressive and abusive isolation measures, including placing tens of thousands of people in mandatory state-run quarantine centers, which operate more like prisons than anything else. 

In Colombia, a lawyer was killed — also in police custody — after violating quarantine rules. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele used coronavirus restrictions as a front to subject the country’s prison population to excruciating conditions — with many being summarily killed.

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President Jair Bolsonaro signaled on Wednesday that he plans to veto a change that would force federal health regulator Anvisa to issue emergency approval for vaccines approved by other countries within the space of five days. The current deadline is twice as long, and Anvisa president Antonio Barra Torres says it would not give the agency not enough time to safely analyze clinical trial data of prospective vaccines.

The change in regulation was proposed by Congress, after newly-elected House Speaker Arthur Lira and Senate President Rodrigo Pacheco promised their priority would be to get vaccines to citizens faster.

Their move, however, has rubbed regulators the wrong way, and they see the change as attempted political interference. “[What Congress is trying to do] equates to telling the judge whether a defendant is guilty or innocent before the trial,” said Mr. Barra Torres.

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On February 10, as a way of demanding more attention from the Rio de Janeiro state government on poor favelas, a group of NGOs held the “Day of Mobilization Efforts against Covid-19,” with several cultural and political awareness-raising activities. 

Besides raising funds for helping those communities, the NGOs demand that Rio health authorities include residents of favelas in priority vaccination groups, with the slogan “Vaccine in the favelas, now.”

Since July 2020, the Unified Panel of Covid-19 in Favelas — a data-compiling initiative to monitor the spread of the coronavirus in poor areas of Rio de Janeiro — has been reporting a lack of care, inconsistent information, and the infeasibility of demanding isolation measures for favela residents with informal jobs. 

The Rio de Janeiro coronavirus collapse

The state of Rio de Janeiro is facing its worst stage of the crisis since the start of the pandemic. The state capital even overtook São Paulo as the Brazilian city with the most Covid-19 deaths, despite having a population half of its size. To make matters worse, the number of available intensive care units in the state dropped by more than 80 percent.

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After being among the first Latin American countries to begin vaccinating health professionals on December 24, and the first to begin inoculating the general population last week, Chile has now reached the mark of 1 million vaccinated citizens.

Besides health workers, as of February 10 over 370,000 people aged 78 and over have received a coronavirus vaccine. 

Chile was able to expand its vaccination program after purchasing 4 million doses from Chinese lab Sinovac Biotech — in addition to 154,000 doses from Pfizer. The Chilean government hopes to vaccinate 15 million people by July 2021, out of its total population of around 19 million.

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Earlier in 2021, the Brazilian city of Manaus — the biggest in the Amazon region — suffered a full-scale health collapse as hospitals ran out of available intensive care beds and encountered a shortage of oxygen supplies. Dozens of patients died of asphyxiation as health units became “suffocation chambers,” per some accounts. The crisis was so grave that Brazil’s normally docile Prosecutor General Augusto Aras called for an investigation into the conduct of Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello.

Now, Mexico is facing similar problems.

The New York Times reports that a second wave of the coronavirus has filled hospitals with patients. Those who must stay at home are dying due to a lack of oxygen tanks — as heated demand created a cut-throat black market in which only the highest bidders can get their hands on the much-needed supplies.

The federal government sent the Mexican National Guard to protect certified trucks transporting oxygen tanks to hospitals and ordered producers to prioritize oxygen for human consumption over industrial oxygen.

In January, Mexico recorded more than 30,000 deaths, the highest monthly toll to date.

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Brazilian health regulator Anvisa will no longer require vaccines used by the UN-backed COVAX facility to file requests for emergency approval. Brazil is expected to receive 10.6 million of the 42 million doses it is entitled to in the first half of the year, mainly from AstraZeneca.

The decision may help speed up the immunization process, as India’s Serum Institute — which has provided the first 2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine — would otherwise have to file for emergency use requests in Brazil.

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