Covid-19: Risk of Dying in Brazil Far Higher Than World Average in 2020 – Study

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The almost 195,000 Covid-19 deaths officially recorded in Brazil by the end of 2020 not only quickly increased this year – this figure is now over 225,000 – but also turned the country into one of the most deadly in the pandemic worldwide, considering Brazil’s demographics and age structure.

In practice, the risk of a Brazilian resident dying of Covid-19 in 2020 was almost four times higher than in the rest of the world, on average.

The findings are based on a study still in progress by economist Marcos Hecksher, a researcher at the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA).

According to his calculations, 169 countries out of 178 (or 95%) registered lower rates of Covid-19 deaths than Brazil, when comparing not only absolute figures, but also population size and deaths in each age group.

This means that if in all these countries citizens had died in the same proportion, by sex and age, as in Brazil, only nine of them would have been in a worse situation than Brazil – i.e., in this comparison, they registered more deaths than they would have had.

Brazil has ranked second in the world in absolute number of Covid-19 deaths for months, behind only the United States, which today accounts for over 443,000 deaths.

However, when the comparison takes into account the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, several European countries, such as Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, moved ahead of Brazil in 2020. After all, they have a proportionally high number of deaths in relation to the size of its population.

This is still true in 2021. On Johns Hopkins University’s most recent survey, the country with the most deaths per 100,000 inhabitants is the United Kingdom, followed by the Czech Republic and Italy. Brazil ranks 12th.

Hecksher recalls that European countries’ populations (as well as the U.S.) have a higher percentage of elderly people than Brazil’s, therefore much more prone to become severely ill when infected with the coronavirus.

Source: BBC Brasil

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