By Anthony Boadle
BRASÍLIA (Reuters) – The governor of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, decreed a 24-hour block on all but essential services on Friday to contain the worsening COVID-19 outbreak that has filled his therapy wards. intensive to the edge.
The drastic move came when right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic that killed 250,000 Brazilians, renewed his attacks on state governors for destroying jobs with blockades.
“The blockade will start today and will be total, it will be 24 hours a day,” said the press officer of Governor Ibaneis Rocha of the Federal District. A decree published at the end of the day said that the blockade would begin shortly after midnight on Saturday.
Shops, pharmacies, gas stations, churches and funeral homes will remain open, the aide said, but everything else will close, especially bars and restaurants, which were responsible for the increased spread at the end of last year and at carnival.
Intensive care units in Brasilia, Brazil’s third largest city with 3 million inhabitants, are as full as they were at the peak of the pandemic last year, with more than 80% of beds occupied, the health department said.
The situation is as or worse in cities across Brazil, with intensive care beds in the capitals of 17 of the 26 Brazilian states reaching this week the most critical level since the beginning of the pandemic, a year ago, according to a report by the biomedical center Fiocruz.
Bolsonaro, who lives and works in Brasilia, said that governors who impose restrictions are doing a terrible service to Brazilians.
“What people want most is to work,” he said on a visit to northeastern Brazil on Friday, the day after Brazil recorded the second worst number of daily deaths. He threatened to cut federal pandemic emergency assistance to states that resorted to blockades.
“From now on, governors who close their states will have to provide their own emergency aid,” said Bolsonaro.
Brazil has had 65,169 new cases of the new coronavirus reported in the past 24 hours and 1,337 deaths from COVID-19, the Ministry of Health said on Friday.
The South American country has recorded 10,455,630 cases since the start of the pandemic, while the official death toll has risen to 252,835, according to ministry data, in the third worst outbreak in the world outside the United States and India and the second most lethal in the world.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle in Brasília; Additional reporting by Pedro Fonseca; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Aurora Ellis)