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. 2021 Jan;51(1):31-36.
doi: 10.1177/0020731420968446. Epub 2020 Oct 25.

Report From Bolsonaro's Brazil: The Consequences of Ignoring Science

Alvaro J Idrovo  1 , Edgar F Manrique-Hernández  1 , Julián A Fernández Niño  2
Affiliations

Report From Bolsonaro's Brazil: The Consequences of Ignoring Science

Alvaro J Idrovo et al. Int J Health Serv. 2021 Jan.

Abstract

Currently, the fast spread of COVID-19 is the cause of a sanitary emergency in Brazil. This situation is largely due to President Bolsonaro's denial and the uncoordinated actions between the federal and local governments. In addition, the Brazilian government has reported that it would change its method of sharing information about the pandemic. On June 6, 2020, the presentation of accumulated cases and deaths was stopped, and the Supreme Court of Brazil determined that the federal government should continue to consolidate and disseminate the accumulated figures of cases and deaths. However, doubt about the transparency of the data remained. We used data reported by the government from Situation Reports 38-209 of the World Health Organization to assess the Benford's law fulfillment as an indicator of data quality. This rapid evaluation of data quality during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil suggests that the Brazilian public health surveillance system had an acceptable performance at the beginning of the epidemic. Since the end of June, the quality of cumulative death data began to decrease and remains in that condition as of August 2020. A similar situation has existed since August, with the data of accumulated new cases.

Keywords: pandemics; politics; public information; science.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Cumulated cases of COVID-19 in Brazil until August 16, 2020, according to the Brazilian government (as reported to the World Health Organization).
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
First-digit frequencies for the Benford distribution of daily reports of cumulated cases in Brazil until August 16, 2020. Bars are the empirical data and markers, with their respective lines, the Benford distribution, and confidence intervals.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
First-digit frequencies for the Benford distribution of daily reports of cumulated deaths in Brazil until August 16, 2020. Bars are the empirical data and markers, with their respective lines, the Benford distribution, and confidence intervals.
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