The virus has killed more than 300,000 people in Brazil its spread aided by a highly contagious variant political infighting

The virus has killed more than 300,000 people in Brazil, its spread aided by a highly contagious variant, political infighting and distrust of science.

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives.

But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s mayor, argued there was a greater imperative.

“Put your life on the line so that we can save the economy,” Mr. Melo appealed to his constituents in late February.

Now Porto Alegre, a prosperous city in southern Brazil, is at the heart of an stunning breakdown of the country’s health care system — a crisis foretold.

More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.

“We have never seen a failure of the health system of this magnitude,” said Ana de Lemos, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in Brazil. “And we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”
On Wednesday, the country surpassed 300,000 Covid-19 deaths, with roughly 125 Brazilians succumbing to the disease every hour. Health officials in public and private hospitals were scrambling to expand critical care units, stock up on dwindling supplies of oxygen and procure scarce intubation sedatives that are being sold at an exponential markup.

Intensive care units in Brasília, the capital, and 16 of Brazil’s 26 states report dire shortages of available beds, with capacity below 10 percent, and many are experiencing rising contagion (when 90 percent of such beds are full the situation is considered dire.)
In Rio Grande do Sul, the state that includes Porto Alegre, the waiting list for intensive care unit beds doubled over the past two weeks, to 240 critically ill patients.

At Hospital Restinga e Extremo Sul, one of the main medical facilities in Porto Alegre, the emergency room has become a crammed Covid ward where many patients received care in chairs, for lack of a free bed. Last week, the military built a tent field hospital outside the main entrance, but hospital officials said the additional bed space is of little use for a medical staff stretched beyond its limit.
“The entire system is on the verge of collapse,” said Paulo Fernando Scolari, the hospital’s director. “People are coming in with more serious symptoms, lower oxygen levels, in desperate need of treatment.”
The breakdown is a stark failure for a country that, in past decades, was a model for other developing nations, with a reputation for advancing agile and creative solutions to medical crises, including a surge in H.I.V. infections and the outbreak of Zika.

Mr. Melo, who campaigned last year on a promise to lift all pandemic restrictions in the city, said a lockdown would cause people to starve.
“Forty percent of our economy, our labor force, is informal,” he said in an interview. “They’re people who need to go out and work in order to have something to eat at night.”

President Bolsonaro, who continues to promote ineffective and potentially dangerous drugs to treat the disease, has also said lockdowns are untenable in a country where so many people live in poverty. While several Brazilian states have ordered business shutdowns in recent weeks, there have been no strict lockdowns.

Some of the president’s supporters in Porto Alegre have protested business shutdowns in recent days, organizing caravans that stop outside of hospitals and blast their horns while inside Covid wards overflow.
Epidemiologists say Brazil could have avoided additional lockdowns if the government had promoted the use of masks and social distancing and aggressively negotiated access to the vaccines being developed last year.

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