Presented in French by Alexandre Da Paiva Rio Camargo, discussed by Anne Rasmussen and moderated by Fabrice Cahen.
The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the role of statistics in Brazil’s experience with the COVID-19 pandemic and their centrality in shaping the public debate. Statistics were not limited to providing indicators and evidence for managing the health crisis; they were openly politicized by the denialist rhetoric of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which plunged the country into a data blackout, offset only by a collective institutional effort to maintain the production and reliability of case and death figures. This phenomenon precipitated two notable consequences, analyzed here. On the one hand, the figures were intensively mobilized to fuel public outrage, serving as a moral framework for holding the federal government accountable for its actions. On the other hand, with the end of the pandemic, the figures on “preventable deaths” have come to shape the collective memory of this pandemic, conferring upon it the dimension of a public health tragedy and fueling current political disputes. From this perspective, the presentation will analyze the ways in which COVID-19 figures have been visualized and dramatized, as well as the pandemic’s effects on the transformation of the data landscape in Brazil.
