Brazil stops releasing Covid-19 death toll and wipes data from official site | World news

Plus de données et hop  !, plus de malades  !
#abracadabra

On Friday night, Brazil’s government stopped releasing the cumulative numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases and obits in its daily bulletin and only supplied daily numbers. A health ministry site was taken offline and returned on Saturday without the total number of deaths and confirmed cases, as well as numbers of cases under investigation and those that recovered. The death counts were reported as 904 on Saturday, 1,005 on Friday and 1,473 on Thursday.

The move was widely criticised across Brazilian society, with doctors, medical associations and state governors attacking what they called an attempt to control information. Federal prosecutors announced an investigation on Saturday and gave the interim health minister 72 hours to explain the move, using the Brazilian constitution and freedom of information law as justification.

“The manipulation of statistics is a manoeuvre of totalitarian regimes,” tweeted Gilmar Mendes, a supreme court judge. “The trick will not exempt responsibility for the eventual genocide.” Rodrigo Maia, speaker of the lower house of Congress, called for the data to be replaced for “transparency”.

Judge orders Bolsonaro to resume publishing Brazil Covid-19 data | Brazil | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/judge-orders-bolsonaro-to-resume-publishing-brazil-covid-19-data