Brazil father mourns son as coronavirus toll rises

The Brazilian father of a 25 year-old victim of COVID-19 could not contain his tears when he described the pain of losing his son to the deadly virus.

Marcio Antonio do Nascimento Silva's voice broke as he recalled not being able to see his son or dress him up in the clothes he had picked for his funeral after he died alone without any family around him.

The Associated Press first reported on Silva's grief in June.

At Copacabana, someone toppled crosses symbolizing the fallen. Silva, the grieving father, drove them back into the sand while pleading for respect.

"At a certain moment, a person started yelling that it was all fake news, a lie, that I didn't hold myself," Silva recalled, speaking to the Assoicated Press last month.

"I came from the middle of the beach, walked all the way on the sand, got this photo of my son, and showed to his face - see if this is fake news, this is my son, 25 years old, died of COVID-19.

One of hardest, most hurtful things, he said, was hearing President Jair Bolsonaro dismiss the death of his son and thousands of others shortly after he had buried him.

Bolsonaro condemned any coronavirus quarantine, saying shutdowns would wreck the economy and punish the poor. He scoffed at the "little flu," then trumpeted the fatalistic claim that nothing could stop 70% of Brazilians from falling ill.

And he refused to take responsibility, when many did.

Asked in April about Brazil's death toll surpassing China's, he responded: "So what? I lament it. What do you want me to do?"

Those words crystallized how many came to view Brazil's pandemic response. For Márcio Antônio Silva, they were a gut punch.

"I put him in the coffin, shut it and said, 'My son, they will take care of you.' And two days later I hear, 'So what?'" the 55 year-old taxi driver said. "It hurt so much. That's maybe what hurts most today."

The story of COVID-19 in Brazil is the story of a president who insists the pandemic is no big deal.

Bolsonaro's key actions were pragmatic and economic, albeit delayed and partially spurred by Congress. He enacted measures to prevent worse layoffs and doled out emergency coronavirus payments.

Among the developing world's most generous, they brought extreme poverty to its lowest level in decades and boosted his popularity.

Bolsonaro could have inspired people to hunker down, too, but instead he encouraged them to flout local restrictions — restrictions that he himself undermined by going out and drawing crowds. And he successfully lobbied for official soccer matches to resume, just as the pandemic peaked.

Denial was widespread in the Amazon city of Manaus, even as its cemetery was digging mass graves and patients were boarding puddle jumpers to go to hospitals.

Contagion traveled upriver to Indigenous territories. In Sao Paulo's towers and along Rio's beaches, quarantine defiers echoed Bolsonaro's dismissal of the disease.

The president's playbook is little changed. Bolsonaro maintains there's no time for hand-wringing, and Brazil's economy needs to start humming.

"We're all going to die someday. Everybody here will die," he said in early November, as he announced measures to restart tourism. "There's no use avoiding reality. We have to stop being a country of sissies."

Brazil has recorded 6.1 million through November 23, 2020, 169,000 deaths and 79.6  cases per 100,000 population.