On February 20th, 2020, I asked the below question to my Twitter followers. Even though I overused the word "over" in the pool's options, I thought it was time to start this blog. My idea here is to write about my expertise, which is the importance of universal healthcare and inequities in health services. Because I am Brazilian and currently living in Brazil, the posts will probably be more Brazilian-focused, for now. Thus, let's look at the Brazilian population by highlighting the basics.
HOW IS BRAZIL DIVIDED?
Brazil is divided into five regions (to download the image below, click here). This is quite important if you want to understand the distribution of health outcomes across space in the country. There are differences within each region, but inequities between regions are quite expressive (I plan to go through this in future posts).
The image is from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), where the main information from Brazil is displayed and where one can find most of the main national-based data. The image above shows us the five divisions:
North (green),
Northeast (yellow),
Centre-west (orange),
Southeast (pink), and
South (purple).
We are basically divided into this order:
Regions > States + Federal District > Municipalities > Districts.
The Federal District is situated in the country's capital, Brasília (a yellow dot in Goiás, Centre-West region). Brasília is where the Federal Government has its headquarters, with its powers: Judiciary, Legislative and Executive.
Brazil has 8.510.820,623 km². By area comparison, we only lose to Russia, Canada, China, and the USA. The best way to understand its size is through a comparison made by The Brazilian Report (click here), where you can see how many countries can "fit" inside Brazil. For a quick comparison, the most well-known State in Brazil, São Paulo (248.209 km²), is larger than the entire United Kingdom (242.495 km²).
POPULATION SIZE AND NATIONAL CENSUS
In my previous Twitter poll, I tried to bring attention to the findings from the National Census in terms of the country's population size. The population size of around 41 million citizens (1st option) resulted from the National Census conducted by IBGE back in 1940. That was actually the 5th Census because results from the 1st (1872) and others that followed didn't have such organised institution/political endorsement. The population size of over 190 million (2nd option) was the last Census (2010) findings. This last Census was great in numbers. Of the 240k professionals hired (for collection, supervision, support and administration activities), 192k were interviewers who covered 5,565 municipalities spread over about 8.5 million km² in Brazil. The total budget of the 2010 Census reached a figure of R$ 1.4 billion, and the interviewers visited 67.569.688 households! (a brief history of the Census can be found here in Portuguese)
Finally, the population size of 210.147.125 individuals (3rd option) is from the periodical estimations by IBGE, which in July/2019 showed that São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, and Salvador were the most populous cities (official information in English can be found here).
There has been one National Census roughly every ten years in Brazil. However, the 2020 data collection, which was supposed to happen between August and October, was postponed due to the SARS-COV-2 spread and COVID-19 pandemic. It seems that in mid-2022, the Government will start the next data collection.
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