Inequality has proven, once more, to affect the dynamics of Covid-19 in Brazil. While in Europe age was the leading discrepancy factor, a new study by the Health Operations and Intelligence Center concluded that class is one of the main factors exacerbating the current public health crisis. The study found that Brazilians who live in cities that present a low score in the Human Develop Index (HDI) are nearly twice as likely to die from Covid-19 than those who live in places with a high HDI.
In low-HDI municipalities, 61.7 percent of those who are infected with the novel coronavirus die. In medium- and high-HDI cities, however, this number falls to 51.5 and 32.9 percent, respectively. For the researchers, one of the reasons that help explain that is the fact that “the lethality rate in Brazil is very high, influenced by inequality in access to treatment.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, The Brazilian Report has highlighted how different expressions of inequality contribute to the aggravation of the crisis in Brazil and Latin America. Last week, Benjamin Fogel explained that those most impacted by Covid-19 are the ones who were already abandoned by the government before the pandemic. And in early-May, we showed how race matters in the fight against the virus.
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