Justus says he was wrong to predict deaths in the pandemic – 03/28/2023 – Panel SA

Faced with the mark of more than 700,000 deaths from Covid recorded this Tuesday (28) in Brazil, businessman and presenter Roberto Justus claims that the predictions made by him at the beginning of the pandemic were wrong, when an audio leaked in which Justus discussed with the also presenter Marcos Mion on the devastating effect of the disease.

In messages sent in March 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Justus said he saw disproportionate hysteria. He treated the most pessimistic predictions like someone who doesn’t understand statistics.

“That was back in the early days of Covid, right at the beginning, when an audio of mine ended up leaking to a friend saying that my forecast wasn’t so pessimistic at first, but obviously I was wrong. pandemic took over. I was one of those a little more optimistic. I’ve always been optimistic throughout my life”, said Justus to the Panel SA this Tuesday (28).

The businessman, however, still insists on criticizing the isolation measures adopted to protect the population.

“One thing I said at the time, and I still maintain, is that the 100% lockdown, the way the Doria government at the time wanted to do it and did it, was very inefficient. by subway, train, going to the bank, supermarket, pharmacy, hospitals. The virus was not in those places. But you couldn’t open stores, restaurants. I defended that there had to be a middle ground: taking good care of things with a mask, alcohol in gel, distancing”, he says.

Justus points out that he was in favor of closing big events like football games with an audience and concerts. “But it couldn’t be radical like ‘you can’t leave the house’. For the less favored, with only one room, imagine what torture it was for people to stay inside the house contaminating themselves. The most privileged layers stayed in their houses of country and beach”, he says.

Justus says he took his opinion to the government at the time. “I even said that at the time to the governor: take all the precautions, especially the population that was most exposed, the elderly and [as pessoas] with comorbidity, but the disease was not so severe as to kill healthy people. That’s what I was talking about. This I continue to uphold,” she says.

In Justus’ predictions, Brazil could have 15,000 or 20,000 deaths. “It was disinformation that, as soon as I realized that the thing was getting bigger, I had already changed my mind. We make mistakes, sometimes, in our statistics and forecasts. The virus of fear is so contagious that it ends up getting in the way people’s lives. So, I had to have a little more common sense”, he says.

In another caveat, he claims he was an advocate of vaccination. “Revisiting this, I downplayed it a bit or imagined that there were fewer victims than it ended up having. This I recognize, but back then, at the beginning, I already realized, due to the increase in deaths, I had already revised my initial point of view”, affirm.

Joana Cunha with Paulo Ricardo Martins It is Diego Felix

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