Luciana Barreto Reveals She Has Contracted The Coronavirus

Luciana Barreto Reveals She Has Contracted The Coronavirus

CNN Brasil journalist Luciana Barreto reveals she has contracted the coronavirus; “feeling good”, she will take a break from reporting for the news giant

By Marques Travae

Not gonna say it nevers fails, but I often notice that when I speak of someone’s name that I may not have mentioned for awhile, something important, sad or just newsworthy is happening with them at that very moment. Today’s story is precisely one of those times.

My last post wasn’t specifically about journalist Luciana Barreto. I brought her name up briefly in a discussion about the network she’s been working for for several months, CNN Brasil, and its record of hiring journalists after their involvement in some racial incident.

The following day after posting that I learned that Luciana revealed that she’s tested positive for the coronavirus. Barreto made this public via her Instagram on Thursday, April 16.

In the short vídeo, Barreto said the following:

“Hello. Good morning friends, good morning family. I am recording this video because I know that soon a lot of questions will start to appear as to why I am not on the journal. Yesterday, unfortunately, my result for Covid-19 was positive. I was having few symptoms. I just got back from the doctor, I had a CT scan and my lung is okay, I’m not taking any medication. But I am having to take several precautions, including social isolation, obviously. I’m at home, I took off my mask so I could record the video, but I’m using it to protect my daughter”

For the WHO, the World Health Organization, which is known as the OMS or Organização Mundial da Saúde in Brazil, jorunalists and news programs are a vital source of news about what’s going and the latest updates Covid-19 situation. In her reports, Barreto covered the coronavirus pandemic and how it is affecting the political and economic structure.

To update her followers on her health and professional status, Barreto also revealed that she would be taking a break from doing CNN Brasil broadcasts but that she is doing fine.

“I’m feeling good. Twice a day we have to answer questionnaires and do a monitoring….We will fight and make of adversity an opportunity for personal growth. I will do more yoga right now, read, take care of the mind and talk to you when I can,” she concluded.

The journalist then then said to followers and attempted to calm people down by ending her short vídeo with good energy and vibrations.

As we know, testing positive for the coronavirus is not necessarily a death sentence. The latest numbers tell us that there have beem 2.26 million cases worldwide with  nearly 155,000 deaths. Of course, I would never minimize anyone’s death from the pandemic; any death is too many and I now know someone that was said to have passed away from the vírus. But the good news, if we can so, is that about 93% of people are surviving the infection. In the United States, the latest figures show the cases/deaths ratio being 710,000/37,000. In the Brazil, the ratio is 34,000/2,100. In other words, there have been more deaths reported in the US than all of the case reported in Brazil.

Considering this rising oinfection rate and death count, in my view, we must take these numbers with a grain of salt, at least in reference to the numbers coming out of the US, far and away the country with the most cases of covid-19. I say this because it is reasonable to conclude that to continue this campaign of fearmongering, the criteria of reporting coronavirus is very different from how deaths due to other illnesses are classified.

Let’s take one example.

Recent reports shows that the number of coronavirus deaths in New York had surged to 10,000. A headline from The Guardian reads “New York City coronavirus death toll jumps past 10,000 in revised count”. Alarming right? But then check what the next line in the report is.

“Soaring death toll has been fueled by adding 3,778 people who weren’t tested for Covid-19 but are presumed to have died from it” (emphasis mine).

Dr. Scott Jensen, a Republican state senator in Minnestoa and a family physician calls the criteria for labeling deaths being attributed to coronavirus “ridiculous” and could be being used to mislead the public. According to Jensen, the CDC’s own manual tells doctors to use “precision and specificity” when defining the cause of death on certificates, but that for coronavirus death certifications are going counter to these guidelines.

Jensen went to explain how the almighty dollar is unfortunately playing a role in the spread of the coronavirus panic. The doctor went on to detail how hospitals are getting more money for listing their patients as being stricken with Covid-19.

“Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you’ll get paid $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000; three times as much. Nobody can tell me, after 35 years in the world of medicine, that sometimes those kinds of things [have] impact on what we do.”

Need more evidence that these numbers are being padded? Let’s go to the CDC’s own website and see what it’s saying. On March 24, in a document entitled “Covid-19 Alert No.2”, a new ICD code was introduced for labeling deaths as coronavirus-related. With the WHO’s new code, U07.2 will be listed when a “laboratory confirmation is inconclusive or not available”. Regarding the question, “Will COVID-19 be the underlying cause?”, the same document spells it out:

“The underlying cause depends upon what and where conditions are reported on the death certificate. However, the rules for coding and selection of the underlying cause of death are expected to result in COVID-19 being the underlying cause more often than not.”

Did you get that? In other words, during this pandemic, deaths will labeled as Covid-19 related whether they actually are or not. See the document here.

Don’t get me wrong, I am NOT saying that coronavirus deaths aren’t happening. But what I am saying is that there is a clear agenda to create a hysteria over this situation. This could be one of the main reasons that there are so many cases and deaths being reported in the US. I haven’t seen comparative measures being taken in Brazil, but then, as I wrote above, Brazil doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the numbers coming out of the US right now.

Whatever the case may be, let me take this time to send out good vibes and best wishes to Luciana Barreto and anyone else who has been affected by this crisis.