Brazil criticizes the government's new method of registering COVID-19
The delay and the lack of consolidated data on the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil raised voices of protest among the political class, the Judiciary and the press associations against the new method of registration of deaths and infections implemented by the government.
According to this Sunday's official bulletin, Brazil is the second country with the most confirmed cases behind the United States (685,427) and the third in number of deaths (37,312). In the last 24 hours there were 1,382 deaths and 12,581 cases.
The Latin American giant adds the tension in the streets during the demonstrations in favour of and against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to a growing advance of the pandemic sprinkled with criticism of the government after altering and delaying the publication of the data on COVID-19.
After three consecutive days with a daily record of deaths, which reached its peak on Thursday with 1,473 deaths, Bolsonaro's Executive adopted a new methodology for the disclosure of official data as of Friday.
The Health Ministry delayed the release of the data by three hours, which are now reported at 10 p.m. (1 a.m. GMT the following day) on the grounds of avoiding "sub-notifications" and "inconsistencies" in the daily report from the 27 states.
The measure was defended by Bolsonaro, who went so far as to say that the Globo network's news programme, which he described as "Funeral TV," would no longer have "news" to give, while the channel then interrupted the transmission of the evening soap opera to go on with the 'flash' news on the daily balance sheet.
The printed versions of the mornings have also stopped including the data of the day because most of the newspapers close their editions before the time in which the bulletin is now released.
The Ministry's platform for data dissemination was "in maintenance" for almost 24 hours and the interruption caused the Johns Hopkins University observatory, a global reference on COVID-19 numbers, to leave Brazil temporarily out of the statistics on Saturday.
After regaining operation, the Ministry's platform no longer included the files with specific data that were always available for download.
This Sunday, the bulletin was still not consolidated, although it put the complete information back in the cloud for downloading.
The delay and the lack of consolidated data raised voices of protest among the political class, the Judiciary and the press associations.
This Sunday, in a television debate, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) said that the government's position is "ridiculous" because "no one is going to hide data forever.
Meanwhile, former minister and former presidential candidate Marina Silva said Bolsonaro is committing "a crime of responsibility" by omission.
Congress President Rodrigo Maia went so far as to request Saturday from the President's Office that the government return to the initial format of data disclosure.
The External Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, meanwhile, sent a communiqué to Maia on Sunday, asking that the data provided by the regional Health Secretariats to the Ministry also be sent in real time to Parliament and to the Court of Accounts of the Union (TCU), which acts as comptroller.
In the same vein, the leader of the opposition in the Lower House, André Figueiredo, announced that he will present a bill on Monday so that Congress can have immediate access to the data and be able to disclose them as well.
Opposition parties also mobilized on Sunday to take the matter to the Supreme Court this week.
The Attorney General's Office, for its part, gave the interim Health Minister, General Eduardo Pazuello, 72 hours to explain and present the administrative act that supports the modification.
