Rio de Janeiro 7th in Covid-19 World Mortality Ranking

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – With a Covid-19 lethality rate of 9.63 percent and a mortality rate of 48.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, above the Brazilian average according to data from Thursday, June 18th, the state of Rio de Janeiro would be ranked seventh in the world in terms of mortality if it were a country.

This is reported by the monitoring portal for Covid-19 known as ‘Observatório Fluminense’, which includes researchers and students from seven institutions, including the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Fluminense Federal University and São Paulo State University (Unesp), in the areas of mathematics, engineering and computing.

In the metric of deaths per million, the data analyzed by the group, referring to June 13th, places the state of Rio de Janeiro well above Brazil’s global position. The country is in the 12th position, with 203.3 deaths per million inhabitants.

“The Covid-19 mortality rate in the city of Rio de Janeiro is over 800 per million inhabitants, while in the state of Rio de Janeiro we have 440 per million. The mortality of Covid-19 in the city of Rio de Janeiro is only less than that observed in two countries (San Marino and Belgium)”.

According to a Ministry of Health report released yesterday, June 19th, in the epidemiological week ending on June 13th, the world reported a rate of 54.6 deaths per million. “Among the countries with a population of over one million inhabitants, Belgium showed the highest coefficient (832.3/1 million), followed by the United Kingdom (611.0/1 million), Spain (580.4/1 million), Italy (566.0/1 million) and Sweden (480.6/1 million)”.

France ranks sixth, with a mortality rate of 450.0/1 million. According to epidemiologist Attila Iamarino, Belgium tops the list in terms of the number of deaths per million inhabitants because it includes in its statistics all the suspected deaths from the novel coronavirus, not only the confirmed ones. In Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, the trend is for the underreporting of cases. The Uerj points out that only 7.2 percent of Covid-19 cases are confirmed.

In this week’s report by the Observatório Fluminense, scientists point out that the number of confirmed cases and deaths per epidemiological week continues to grow in several parts of the country, while state and municipal governments reduce restrictive measures and allow a broader flow of people.

“Virtually all federal states in Brazil still show high contagion rates (although decreasing), although exceptions are seen in Amazonas, Ceará, Pernambuco, and Roraima, which show signs of a reduction. On the other hand, other states, such as Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul and Mato Grosso, present smooth contagion progression curves in comparison to the other states of the federation”.

As for mortality, researchers point to stability in the number of weekly records in the country and a drop in the states of Alagoas, Amazonas, Pará, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro.

World overview

At a time when the number of cases in the world has passed 8.5 million and the number of deaths by Covid-19 is close to half a million, the group’s analysis involving 16 countries showed that there is no trend towards a drop in contagion in Brazil, Chile, Sweden, and Iran. The United States and Russia show a stable level of contagion.

Mortality has not shown a downward trend in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Russia, and Iran. In Sweden, there is an improvement with a decrease in the number of weekly deaths.

In Latin America, the monitoring group points to the trend towards containing the epidemic in Uruguay, while Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and the Dominican Republic do not show signs of being close to controlling infection, despite having stabilized the number of weekly deaths.

In the indicator developed by the group called ‘Semáforo da Covid-19’ (Covid-19 Signal), which shows the countries or states that are defeating the pandemic in green, those that are “almost there” in yellow and those that “need to act” in red, Brazil is shown in red on both the indicator of new cases and of deaths per week. All Brazilian states are in red on both indicators.

The Ministry of Health’s report shows that Brazil has passed the United States in the number of new coronavirus cases per week, since the infection curve here began to stabilize in epidemiological week 23, which ended on June 13th, when 177,668 cases were recorded. This is close to the number recorded in the preceding week when there were 174,406 new cases.

The North American curve has been dropping since week 15, which ended on April 11th, when it peaked at 223,595 cases, with a new peak of 213,257 cases in week 18. Last week the United States recorded 151,148 new cases.

The United States now counts 2,196,998 cases of Covid-19 and 118,758 deaths. Brazil counts a cumulative total of 978,142 cases and 47,748 deaths. The two countries show the highest number of cases and deaths from the disease.

Source: Agência Brasil