Bolsonarists said the pandemic would be over by now. That was 11,000 deaths ago

Exactly one month ago, Congressman Osmar Terra — Jair Bolsonaro’s Citizenship Minister at the time — sent an audio message to Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the president’s eldest son, foretelling the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. “The good news is that the epidemic is already declining. The peak was reached late in March […] The epidemic is not falling, it’s plummeting. The number of new cases is going down at an astonishing pace. Two, three more weeks, and it’s over. […] It’s time to celebrate.”

When Mr. Terra prematurely called for celebrations, the coronavirus had infected 25,000 Brazilians, killing 1,500. Now, cases have reached almost 180,000 people and 12,400 Brazilians have died of Covid-19.

But Mr. Terra’s outlandish optimism was not without its ulterior motive. Then-Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta was in the president’s firing line, and Mr. Terra was lobbying to get his job. The congressman had a clear strategy: fully buying into Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-quarantine message and unsubstantiated cheerfulness. On the same day Mr. Terra’s audio clip leaked, President Bolsonaro told reporters that “the virus is already leaving [Brazil].”

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