The Brazilian Story

Time to take a little break from updating my Power BI files from the Covid Tracking Project to the CDC data. Last night I found some errors in my measures so I’m working on fixing that today.

But a break now. While the US data is being updated, I can still look at what is going on around the world and Brazil is an interesting and sad case. Their daily case numbers are now surpassing the US daily case numbers, as shown in the following graphics.

The highlighted purple line represents South America which surpassed the US (pink line) sometime in mid February. You can see the US daily cases really plummeting, but I would not start celebrating because look at Europe (orange line): they were plummeting too until maybe end of February and now Europe is surging upward on their third surge. We are always a few weeks behind Europe, so it’s not time to celebrate, especially since some state governors have rescinded their masks mandates and started opening up fully and since we are heading into spring break and you know those college kids haven’t matured enough (heck, some adults aren’t fully matured!)

Here are some more graphics but this time showing the top 10 countries in number of cases and deaths rather than comparing continents.

In these graphics, you can see that almost in every country in the world, at least the top ten, cases and deaths are leveling off, with the exception being Brazil. Brazil is the only one in the top 10 with accelerating cases and deaths. It is as if they are not even trying.

The fourth graphic depicts how Brazil’s cases and deaths practically consumes the entire South American continent. I don’t know if it is because the other countries are not reporting or have faulty reporting and therefore Brazil just shows up as being in a very bad way.

The daily cases in South America is basically that of Brazil and Brazil is going up, up and away. On Friday, I think Brazil didn’t report there numbers but last night they came in with a surge which looks like a reporting of two days worth of numbers.

Now that we have a new President, I’m having we will no longer look like Brazil but we are not out of the woods yet. Like I said earlier, Europe is surging again and we are usually a few weeks behind them. We have a couple of governors who have recently announced a loosening of restrictions and we are heading into spring break season. We still have a high level of cases being reported each day: just shy north of 50K, the level we started to broach back in October. In September we were hovering below 50K.

We need to get below 50K; I read somewhere that we need to be in the vicinity of 10K before we start to feel comfortable.

So we have a ways to go.

But I don’t think Americans, at least some Americans – I’m not going to name who, have the discipline to do what needs to be done.