Quantifying political influence on COVID-19 fatality in Brazil

The COVID-19 pandemic was severely aggravated in Brazil due to its politicization by the country’s central government. However, the impact of diffuse political forces on the fatality of an epidemic is commonly hard to quantify. Here we introduce a method to measure this effect in the Brazilian case, based on the inhomogeneous distribution throughout the national territory of political support to the central government. The correlation between fatality rate and political support grows as the government’s misinformation campaign is developed, leading to the dominance of such political factor for the pandemic impact in Brazil in 2021. Once this dominance is established, this correlation allows for an estimation of the total number of deaths due to political influence as 350 ± 70 thousands up to the end of 2021.