In Brazil Bodies Begin to Pile Up

In Manaus, Brazil, Covid-19 has arrived and the city of over two million is struggling with limited resources.  Brazil's Trump loving president, Jair Bolsonaro, has downplayed the pandemic even more aggressively than Trump himself.   Bolsonaro fired Brazil's health minister for the temerity to suggest implementing social distancing in the face of the crisis.  The good news for Bolsonaro, Manaus' heathcare system is so overloaded it may be impossible to determine home many of his fellow Brazilians, Bolsonaro's policies are killing.

Bodies are piling up in refrigerated trucks outside overwhelmed hospitals. Doctors are in short supply. Bulldozers are digging mass graves at cemeteries. And the worst of the pandemic is yet to come.

Welcome to Manaus, the now chaotic and desperate riverside capital of vast Amazonas state as it grapples with the highest coronavirus mortality rate of any such city in Brazil.

The daily death rate here has shot up from 20 or 30 pre-pandemic to 100 a day in a matter of weeks after the city recorded its first case on March 13. And an already weak health care system has simply collapsed.