COVID-19 in Brazil

Two years into the pandemic, the expressive the numbers leave no room for doubt: COVID-19 has been the most tragic event in recent history. As of March 11, 2022, the Coronavirus Resource Center at John Hopkins University showed over 471 million confirmed cases worldwide and 6.07 million deaths. On the same day, the #PainelConass COVID-19 showed that Brazil had reached 657,000 deaths 1 . But it is not just the numbers and their important biomedical and epidemiological repercussions that need highlighting. Pandemics also provoke and deepen structures of inequality and social injustice, with a large number of devastating humanitarian, economic, environmental, political and cultural effects in the short, medium and long term (Grossi & Toniol 2020; Torales et al. 2020; Gamlin et al. 2021; Grisotti, 2020; Segata et al. 2021; Segata et al. 2022). The Brazilian case is particularly disturbing. The COVID-19 pandemic has become a critical event of multiple proportions, exacerbated by the disastrous but no less premeditated combination of a president characterized as genocidal and a government commanded by economic capital. All over the country, in states and municipalities, pandemic management committees have multiplied, formed largely by political agents, their advisors, and representatives of the corporate interests of industry and commerce. Community leaders and union representatives of the working class were not invited to sit at these management tables, even when the agenda was the in-person reopening of industry, of commerce, or a return to in-person learning. The fate of the population during the pandemic has not been negotiated as if it were in a situation of vulnerability and at risk of contamination and illness (Mastrangelo, Segata & Rico