Rio de Janeiro sees eight times more deaths in 2020

While the coronavirus epidemic has already been recognized as the deadliest event in Brazilian history (barring colonization and slavery, which lasted for centuries), there is a consensus that official data doesn’t come close to defining the full extent of the crisis. Underreporting has been denounced in several states and municipalities, as The Brazilian Report has illustrated recently. One of the persistent inconsistencies with Brazil’s pandemic data regards deaths as a result of Covid-19 being recorded with different causes. In that vein, properly identifying the scale of the crisis may be achieved by analyzing the absolute number of deaths around the country. And in many of Brazil’s major state capitals, mortality has gone through the roof in March, April, and May of this year.

In the case of Rio de Janeiro, the city has recorded eight times more deaths than the average for the past four years in the same period. The Brazilian Report analyzed data from Civil Registry transparency platforms and found that in May, 16,356 people died in Rio de Janeiro...