As an American, I’ve been in denial about how the world perceives us after Trump was elected president and then received 74 million votes in his failed bid for reelection. I’m horrified by the nearly 600,000 of my fellow citizens who have died of COVID-19, but I often forget how big this failure looks from the outside, particularly when paired with our nation’s reputation for scientific excellence. I probably am also treating the recent improvement in pandemic conditions here as somewhat inevitable rather than the result of changes in policy under President Biden.

But I’m disabused of my complacency when I read about what’s going on in Brazil, the country where the Trumpist president never left.

Tom Phillips of The Guardian reports from Rio de Janeiro:

t was midway through February when André Machado realized Brazil’s coronavirus catastrophe was racing into a bewildering and remorseless new phase. “The floodgates opened and the water came gushing out,” recalled the infectious disease specialist from the Our Lady of the Conception hospital in Porto Alegre, one of the largest cities in southern Brazil.

Since then, Machado’s hospital, like health centres up and down the country, has been engulfed by a deluge of jittery, gasping patients – many of them previously healthy and bafflingly young.

Part of the problem is no doubt a new variant of the virus that is both more infectious and more lethal, especially to younger populations. But, remember, variants arise when the virus is spreading widely, which is what happens when you adopt Trumpist pandemic policies that discourage masks and social distancing and raise doubts about the seriousness of the disease.

At the end of last year Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro – a Donald Trump-worshiping populist who has gleefully sabotaged Covid containment efforts – declared his country had reached “the tail end” of what was already one of the world’s worst outbreaks.

Bolsonaro was wrong.

Three months later Latin America’s largest nation has lost almost 100,000 more lives – taking its total death toll to more than 275,000, second only to the US – and been plunged into the deadliest chapter of its 13-month epidemic.

It hurts to read that paragraph and understand that as bad as Brazil has done, “they’re second only to the US.” But it’s also a possible image of where this country would be right now if Trump had been reelected.

In truth, the situation in Brazil is not just a catastrophe there, but a potential catastrophe for the whole world. As we race to contain the virus with vaccines, Brazil’s lax policies have already resulted in a nasty variant. It appears that the Pfizer vaccine, at least, can defeat the Brazilian strain, but more could arise that our vaccines cannot handle. This is why President Biden said that Texas and Mississippi leaders are “neanderthals” for doing away with COVID-19 containment efforts before our inoculation efforts are complete. We don’t want to live in Brazil’s alternate reality:

This week, as a record 2,349 daily deaths were reported, the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva castigated Bolsonaro’s “moronic” handling of the crisis and urged citizens to confront their incompetent “blowhard” leader. “This country is in a state of utter tumult and confusion because there’s no government. I’ll repeat that: this country has no government,” Lula declared, blaming Bolsonaro’s “uncivilised” leadership and rejection of science for the scale of Brazil’s disaster.

“So, so many lives could have been saved,” Lula claimed, warning: “Covid is taking over the country.”

Our country had “no government” until noon on January 20. Looking at Brazil, it’s easy to see how badly we were doing before that and how fortunate we are that we changed course and elected Biden.