This news is not surprising at all.
I'm going to avoid adjectives so that my comment doesn't get downvoted into oblivion by government fanboys, but let's just say that it is safe to assume that the Brazilian federal government does not believe science should be the main weapon in the fight against Covid.
Brazil is one of the few countries that denies the pandemic[1]. The others are Turkmenistan, Belarus and Nicaragua. Fun fact: neither of those are really democracies (whether Brazil still is a democracy, it is increasingly debatable).
The Brazilian president has scoffed covid as "a little flu"[2].
He is also against social distancing/lockdown measures, claiming they don't work[3]. Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything.
State governors are basically on their own since the beginning of the pandemic -- a lot of states implemented lockdowns/social distancing, but with limited effect since Bolsonaro routinely goes on national TV to downplay those measures and basically call them a hoax.
The situation now is that people are fed up with the long, ineffective (because they were always superficial, half-baked) social distancing and lockdowns, and the state governments are beginning to reopen right when the death toll is accelerating.
So basically we're screwed. Deaths will accelerate like crazy now that a lot of places are reopening and the federal government will do anything it can to hold onto its alternate reality where everything is fine.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/974dc9d2-77c1-4381-adcd-2f755333a...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/06/a-little-flu-brazil-s-bo...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/04/while-bra...
We're also severely under-tested. Given our fickle social distancing and isolation, I highly doubt we "only" have 600K infected people. Our flagship universities (USP, UERJ) have already estimated that the real number can be up to 16 times higher.
The population is encouraged to reach out to the health service only when they have the most severe symptoms, since the public health service is at the edge of collapse in many states. The number of people dying at home, and dying from severe respiratory syndrome is abnormally high. It all adds up to an even grimier picture.
About our governors and mayors, I personally think most of them are doing what they possibly can do. They're facing an immense pressure to roll back lock-down measures in order to "save the economy" partly because of the finance minister's catastrophic failure. Businesses had a hard time getting credit, and the people in need were left scrambling for that ridiculous $120/month benefit.
We're living in a failed state.
I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. (Living in Germany, I do trust Angela Merkel that much, for example. I want that for everyone.)
I want to live in a world where everyone knows to verify things for themselves. Yes, I'd like leaders we can trust, but trust should never mean "don't check". (At the very least, have multiple other sources you trust to cross-check your sources of authority.)
That's not to say you can simply declare trust (though TOFU / TOFI tit-for-tat is remarkaby reliable), and the question of how to bootstrap trust is a difficult one. Ironically, many nationalist/populist behavioral patterns substitute a sense of tribal trust patterns for epistemic ones.
Ideally, a set of values and institutions which provide robust cross-checking and validation, distributing the trust verification burden, emerge. Any systemic doctrine of power concentration, whether authoritarian government, monopolistic economies, exclusive religions, educational uniformatism, etc., tends to undermine this.
And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1]
It fails two ways:
1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.
2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).
There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats.
Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs.
A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased.
What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this.
Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems.
________________________________
Notes:
1. As I was composing this reply, another HNer in a different thread makes similar remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409
When I said "apply critical thinking to all sources", that doesn't mean "re-derive everything from scratch and give zero weight to information obtained from others". "be prepared to question any belief" is closer to what I had in mind. Beyond that, there's little harm in trusting a single source for information you are not actually heavily relying on yourself, but that wasn't really the point of this thread. Are you really trying to argue that the world would fall apart if people generally speaking put a little more critical thought into verifying information they're exposed to from a single source before giving it undue weight?
And rereading this thread, particularly your response here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447763), that seems to me close to your argument. If not from scratch and first principles, in large part.
If not, care to restate?
It's less the obligation to validate, and more the licence to bullshit, that concerns me. Brandolini's asymmetry is steep. I've spent more time than I'd have liked around intentionally devceptive persons, and institutions (and machines). The experience is virtually always tremendously umsettling, at best.
There are reasons why social, moral, and legal strictures against deception, fraud, and betrayal of trusts run so deep, with frictions against values of free expression. Dante put bearers of false witness in the penultimate circle of his Hell.
Manaus: the consensus in the general population seemed to be that the city was (1) too remote for COVID to arrive (2) heat and sun would stifle it and (3) their endemic diseases (malaria, dengue etc) were worse anyways so who cares? People seemed to mostly ignore the first lockdown measures.
Now, maybe ~30% of the people we know personally in the city have had COVID. Overall, it seems like there is a lot of death but we stopped following closely because it was too painful.
Minas Gerais: impressive lockdown in March. Small cities in the interior quarantined immediately, screening checkpoints with nurses everywhere. I have no idea how things turned out there but my guess is pretty well.
Return to USA: we bailed out of Brazil as soon as we could due to the lockdowns. The only sign in the Houston airport that COVID existed at that point was a small sign warning travelers from Wuhan to self-quarantine. Embarrassing.
But the mental toll to deal with this president is very high!
I thought a lot before posting here because this government has a lot of fanboys/fangirls that use war tactics to hide things. The first posts here were of people trying to show that things are ok and numbers are being publicized, what is a lie.
These same people will come back here to downvote any comment that exposes the real situation. They do this in news portals, social media, WhatsApp, etc. It is disgusting and tiring.
I don't think that's true at all, I've never seen anything like that downvoted here. HN seems to be a generally well-educated, scientifically-minded crowd.
Please post, por favor!
There's a large educated crowd here who refuse to believe what the health researchers are saying or what studies have found in favor of partisan nonsense.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236613
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/states-manipulate-coronaviru...
This was shocking to the person who was convinced that the government was secretly trying to kill hundreds of thousands of people by using 5G to beam viruses into people through radio.
So, I guess it all depends on what denialism means these days.
My parent live in one of the capitals in the south and one of them is working directly on the "frontlines". They had one covid-related death in the past 30 days and most of the reserved hospital beds are empty. Their city took stronger measures much earlier and their poverty rate is the lowest in the country. Other than school and some other business, life there is normal.
(throwaway for I try to to avoid identifying information associated with my username/handle)
Not anymore, now that Bolsonaro has fired two (!) health ministers and put a worthless yes-man in charge.
And we thought it was bad enough when he fired the first health minister to put a yes-man in his place. It turned out that the first yes-man wasn't spineless enough for Bolsonaro so he also got fired.
Wait, when did he put somebody in charge? I though the position was empty.
https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/06/03/ha-quase-vi...
I live in the interior of Minas Gerais, a state that's comparable to Texas in area and to Florida in population size. The mayor of my town locked down the city relatively early (late March). It didn't last long, with local businesses pressuring for it to reopen and low coronavirus incidence, but I think it helped. A more recent decree has made masks mandatory. So far the numbers look OK - there has been a single COVID-19 death (~80k population).
Other Brazilian states have not been so lucky. I can say with confidence that it would have helped tremendously if the federal government had taken this seriously from the beginning, and organised a nation-wide plan to handle the crisis. It is inconceivable to me that anyone would disagree. We were well aware of the situation in other countries - there was no reason to assume things would have played out differently in Brazil. While Brazil hasn't been as hard hit as other countries if you consider population size, no one has dealt with the problem as irresponsibly as we have. Tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. It is a real tragedy.