RIO DE JANEIRO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 08th July, 2020) Former Brazilian Health Minister Henrique Mandetta said in an interview with Globonews that he hoped President Jair Bolsonaro would reconsider his attitude toward the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) after he himself got infected with COVID-19.
Bolsonaro said Tuesday he had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Mandetta said he hoped the president would recover and that he would "think about people who have had no access to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a personal doctor from the first day."
The ex-minister also doubted the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, a drug that Bolsonaro had begun to take to treat COVID-19. Mandetta said the medicine was "politicized".
Brazil is currently in second place globally in terms of the number of coronavirus cases (1,668,589) and death toll (66,741). A total of 976,977 people have recovered from the disease in the country so far.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of the new coronavirus a pandemic on March 11.
According to the WHO, the global coronavirus death toll has surpassed 535,000 people, with the number of cases worldwide exceeding 11.5 million.
