Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro again on Friday defied the recommendations of staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The representative, who minimizes the danger of COVID-19 and has even called the virus “gripecita”, left his official residence in the morning and went with a nutritious entourage to the affluent southwest neighborhood of Brasilia.
First he visited a pharmacy, where the cars of the official caravan were greeted with some applause but also with the noise of saucepans beaten by many neighbors who, from their balconies and windows, demanded aloud to return to his home and respect the quarantine imposed by the regional government.
He then went to a residential building, where there was also some split between applause and saucepans, and finally, before returning to his residence, made a stopover at the Armed Forces Hospital for reasons that were not officially clarified.
In the only words he addressed to journalists, the leader of the Brazilian far-right merely said that he barely exercised “the constitutional right to come and go freely.”
Bolsonaro, who has criticized from the outset the measures restricting the movement of people imposed by governors or mayors to stop the coronavirus, has challenged these decisions permanently and especially on weekends, in which he has toured some of the few open shops in Brasilia.
According to the representative, quarantines will have an impact on the country’s economy that will be “much worse” than the coronavirus itself and, just as it is necessary to preserve the health of the population, it is more urgent to maintain jobs and economic activity, because “hunger also kills”.
Bolsonaro’s firm position is radically opposed to that defended by his own government through the Ministry of Health, whose owner, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, insists time and again that social isolation is the only effective method of reducing the number of contagions, which many fear might cost him the office.
Several polls indicate that about 75% of Brazilians approve of Mandetta’s handling of the health crisis, while the rest agree with Bolsonaro that the severity of the pandemic has been “exaggerated,” largely by the press.
According to the latest official data, at least 941 people have died and another 17,857 have been infected in Brazil, when the peak of the pandemic is not yet reached, which is expected in the country by early May.
