the headlines: the uk government has set out a "conditional plan" to gradually ease the anti—virus lockdown in england. those who cannot work from home will now be actively encouraged to return to their workplaces, but should avoid public transport. from wednesday, people will be able to do unlimited exercise outdoors. the measures won't apply in scotland, wales or northern ireland. leaders in those parts of the uk say people should continue to remain in their homes except for essential reasons. the leader of the opposition labour party said the government's announcement " raises as many questions as it answers." disney's theme park in shanghai has reopened after a 3—month shutdown. it comes as the chinese city of wuhan has reported a small cluster of new locally transmitted cases, the highest number in the city since the coronavirus pandemic was declared. now on bbc news,

it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. while some countries are claiming success in their efforts to curb covid—19, brazil is increasingly looking like an outlier. the rate of new infections is still increasing and the death toll is mounting and all the while presidentjair bolsonaro is focused on reopening the economy and easing social distancing measures. he fired his health minister after a series of disagreements and my guest today is that health minister, luiz henrique mandetta. is president jair bolsonaro putting his nation at risk?

luiz henrique mandetta, welcome to hardtalk. 0k, nice to hearfrom you. nice to hearfrom england. it is just three weeks or so since you were fired by president bolsonaro. now that you have had time to reflect on what happened, what are your emotions about it all? well, that is something that he is in charge, he was elected to hire and fire ministers. he had a view that the economic crisis would be much deeper if everybody would follow the health department on keeping distance and staying home. so there was pretty much confusion for the population and he is in charge so he decided to do it.

as a citizen now, i am supporting the new minister of health, cheering for him to do a good job and trying to support those decisions they could make and behaving as a citizen now. but the question is, really, what is going wrong in brazil? we look at the figures today. well over 100,000 cases of infection according to the official figures, but according to unofficial estimates, the number of infections could be well over1 million. brazil could have, according to the university of sao paulo medical school, the highest number of infections in the whole world. so what is going wrong? i think that people started — theyjust did not want to keep on with staying at home and they decided, well, brazil is a whole continent. we are a very large country with

250 million people living here. it is natural that we have more cases than small countries like portugal or greece. brazil is larger than the whole of europe itself, so it is not... it is not not fair to compare brazil to a small country. i understand the point you are making — brazil is a very large country with a large population. but perhaps what makes brazil so very different from countries like germany or south korea, who have successfully controlled and curbed covid—19, the difference is that brazil is led by a president, jair bolsonaro, who from the very beginning has belittled the danger of covid—19, calling it a little flu, sniffles. but more than that, he's encouraged his people to return to work. he wants to see the lockdown relaxed, the social distancing eased

as soon as possible. he goes to rallies without wearing a mask, he makes a point of shaking hands with people and taking selfies, abandoning social distancing. the president himself must bear responsibility, surely? i am sure that history willjudge him because it is exactly as you said. but this is not something that a society makes a decision going for only one people's mind. the press does a wonderfuljob here and we have been watching everything that has been happening around the world since china started releasing the images, but mostly when we saw italy, spain, france and england, when we saw the nurses with bags on their heads to protect themselves, and we saw many politicians dealing with that in a way that they did not know exactly how to balance

the health and the economy and even today, this is a challenge for many heads of states all over the world. bolsonaro made his statement clearly and he decided for the economy, which brought him into collision with my position as minister of health. but it's his right, he is in charge. he was elected. we will have elections in a couple of years so people will be able to judge and say if they understood that or not. i think that we have... but with respect, respect, if i may... we have more than him. we have some governors of states, mayors that also had this behaviour. but the bottom line is, as you just said, bolsonaro is in charge, bolsonaro has set the course and he has delivered the message from the very top. does mr bolsonaro, in your opinion,

have blood on his hands right now? i would not put it that way. it would not help anything in the situation that we have here in brazil right now. i think that the whole country is trying to do its best and the health department and also trying to bring a clear message that people have to take care of their parents, grandparents and elderly people and also have to take care of their health system. he is one voice. he is not the single voice in this country. we have the parliament open, the supreme court open. all everybody is talking about it and he is one person, and what he says when you look at the polls, people have been very careful to listen just for him. but no doubt that he will be responsible as time goes by.

i think that the cases are just starting to get high here. we are now entering the season where we have the respiratory syndromes in the southern hemisphere and in brazil, the highest time, season for flu isjune and july and august. so we are just getting into the hottest time that we are going to pass through. so i think that his message is very confusing for people. i think that people did not trust as much as we needed them to trust, mainly because of the social aspects of a country that people leave from the city, they leave from what is — and the social security did not arrive at the right time,

but he will take this to his account, no doubt about that. i want to ask a personal question. you had many meetings with him and i wonder why you did not quit sooner. there was a period in march where it seems he was leaving you out of some of the most important meetings about how to handle coronavirus, he was humiliating you in public by completely opposing your message about being strict on social distancing, he was saying forget about it, we need to keep the economy moving. why didn't you quit sooner? a physician never abandons a patient and that is something that i carry with me. but what i think is that by staying in office and making those statements that the health department needed to do, this debate helped many people to make a betterjudgement about whom to follow and how to behave. so i think that this was important for that period of time. they needed to see that there was a different voice

about the disease, about the problem of the disease. right. well, yeah, you certainly delivered the message that covid—i9 needed to be taken seriously and people needed to keep social distance. but are you yourself culpable in one important way? you were the chief at the health ministry through the beginnings of the covid—i9 response when brazil's attitude to testing was woefully inadequate and we look now at the latest figures, which suggest that brazil's ability to test its own population for covid—i9 is, frankly, pitiful. the united states does more than 30 times the number of tests that brazil does, and that is why the university of sao paulo now believes that not only could you have 1.5 million cases in the population, which you do not even know about, but they say brazil

is going to be the global epicentre of the pandemic and you must share some responsibility for that. yeah, no doubt. in the beginning, when china released the first cases and the world health organization said that it was a problem, it seemed to us here that the virus would be what we call here a heavy virus, a virus that did not have a lot of ability to really spread around. it seemed much more like a sars in 2002 than a virus that would be so capable of spreading to people. so we paid careful attention to how it was spreading around china. we only saw wuhan, the only city where we had cases. all the other cities, even beijing,

they did not pass more than 2,000 cases, so it seemed like a virus that could be controlled. then we saw iran and the whole damage to their health system, we said, come on, they are under a severe economic blockade so maybe it is just the way things went there. but when we saw italy and france, when we saw spain and england, and then we paid attention to the united states and the united states, mr trump was very comfortable in saying he would take care of that, we really thought he had some kind of science that would be released soon. but then we saw new york going down, we saw california and florida go down, chicago going down, and since the beginning, we were trying to buy things, but you are a rich country.

europe is a rich country. the us private sectorjust went inside this market and they brought everything, masks and they took from one country to another the masks, the ventilators, everything that you would need to buy from china. china was closed almost 35 days in the beginning and theyjust did not sell. so we started to produce the tests here, but it is not only producing, it is the capability of the logistics and having the machines to read the tests, so even the machines to buy and bring them into the country was hard. but we arranged by the paho, which is the pan american health organisation, to get 12 million tests, pcr rt and 10 million tests that we could purchase in china... but mr mandetta...

but we kept kept close attention on how england was doing and this kind of testing everybody was not the goal in the beginning. the question now, given where brazil is today with the possibility, given the failure of testing, the possibility that you already have 1.5 million people infected and you have a president who is asking for the economy to be opened up for social distancing to be relaxed, the question is, how bad could it get? what is your feeling? well, it could get as bad as the virus is going to spread all over the country. in the health system — there is no health system in the world that is able to take care of people at the same time going inside intensive care units. this is how bad it's going to be. but what we're going to watch is different cities, different stages, different places in brazil, and different times of this epidemic curve.

we have — down in the south in brazil we have sao paulo and rio de janeiro. rio dejaneiro is going to have a terrible time in the next two or three weeks, because it's rising up. and rio is such a city that you have the seashore and the mountains, and its people are very crowded to each other. even in a social way, to do social distancing is almost impossible in rio. so we're going to watch different cities, different people... mr mandetta, if i may interrupt forjust a second on that question of rio, you said it is going to get terrible. i read in the brazilian press yesterday that there were scenes of crowds of people eating barbecue food outside, without any social distancing, other crowds gathering outside metro stations. it seems that brazilians, taking their lead from the president, are not taking social distancing seriously anymore, and that may lead to a national catastrophe. what can be done about it?

well, we have to alert, we have to talk, we have to speak. in rio, you have the governor, you have the mayor. and they have responsibility, because the supreme court decided that the responsibility to make the social distance work is from governors and mayors, that they are the ones that have — they have the responsibility to do it. what we see in rio is such — such a socialfigure that the favelas, i will call the slums — it's very hard. it's one of the cities with the largest numbers of tuberculosis. so, when you get a respiratory virus inside of it, then that is going to be very, very hard to deal with it. and we have been — this is not from now. this is something that rio should have worked better since forever. so we are going to face very, very high prices for things

that we didn't do in the past, and that you're really going to need it now. we have some good things, besides that. 0ur health system is the best system that stopped smoking in the last 30 years. only 8% of the brazilian society smokes, which is a big difference from the european societies. let's see if that plays any role. in those favelas, you have very young people, so let's see how is that going to work with them. but it's really going to be a very high level of stress in rio, which is a pity. and i want to ask about one other location, and that is the state of amazonas, and in particular manaus, the biggest city in the amazon region. the mayor there has said that right now he feels like he's watching a horror movie. there are not enough spaces in the cemetery for all of the dead. and those people, activists who represent the indigenous peoples of the amazon, say that they fear there is going to be a de facto genocide of indigenous peoples.

is the brazilian government in essence saying it doesn't really care, or doesn't care enough, about the suffering of the indigenous peoples? because it seems the resources are simply not there to help these people. well, that is not true. the amazon is larger than europe, and people there have been living, and you have different indians and different societies — you have people that have been really living where they started their lives, since ever. and brazil is one of the countries that most spends money on help for indians. we have helicopters, aeroplanes, we have physicians, we have nurses. we have a health system that is devoted for the indians. the problem is that this disease is very hard. you have people that go inside those places where they live,

religious people, people that work for mining, people that go for non—governmental organisations, they go there to try to help them, and really expose them to the virus. and indians — since europeans arrived here, the respiratory virus, like another virus like measles, or mumps, they really made a big damage to indians. we are trying to keep them as isolated as we can. then you have the indians that live in towns, and they go back and forth. they go to their villages and they go to town. those are the hardest ones to take care of, because they have to go inside the health system of the city, and sometimes they don't understand or they don't even understand what is written. it is very hard, but you have a health system that really is really devoted to them. but the virus, for indians, has always been a very, very hard task for them to pass through. right, we have discussed the health emergency in brazil. before we finish —

we don't have much time, but before we finish, i want to ask you a couple of quick questions about the bigger picture. one is about the economy. president bolsonaro‘s message, when he says we have to get back to work, we have to ease the social distancing, we have to focus now and brazil's economy. he says the people are desperate to get back to work, state governors should stop calling for the strict lockdown. he says the destruction ofjobs by some governors in this country is irresponsible and unacceptable, and we're all going to pay a higher price for it. do you think he is right to in essence put economic priorities at the top of the agenda right now, despite the healthcare crisis? no, i think he is completely wrong. that's why i was fired — i put lives first. and i think that if we would be able to keep a better — a better way to take care of people, the economy would respond much easier in our near future. but if we keep doing this kind of message,

and people decided to go to work and try to survive anyway, because the president is saying so, we're probably going to have a very deep health crisis, which is going to make the economic crisis be even deeper. so we will see what is going to happen. we have to do now, the whole community, and the press, and health people from science, we are all talking with people and giving the message that, listen, it's better to slow down a little bit. let's pass through in a very slow motion, and then we will recover the economy, which is going to be something that the world will have to do. the world will have to sit around a table and try to figure out a new way for economies to work. 0therwise, we're going to have the damage of this virus will be much longer than humanity needs to. so i have been working

on the post—coronavirus crisis, trying to figure how the world is going to work. not only the health system, but also the economy, also the relations that we're going to have, that we're going to have to build, in a different agenda. but i think that he is wrong, yes. you say he is wrong. when he fired you, you said he hasn'tjust fired me, he has actually fired science. since then, we have also had the justice minister announce his resignation because of political interference from the president. there is a sense of political crisis in brasilia right now, and many of his critics are saying that bolsonaro isn't fit for office, he should be impeached, that he is endangering the country. do you believe that? well, we have a democratic society. and the impeachments were done in brazil twice in the last 30 years, for different reasons.

as soon as — as long as we have this kind of situation, we have a free parliament, a free society, i think that people are going to do what they have to do. but i really think that things are working. the democratic system — although we have this kind of noise, the democratic system is working pretty well. a free press, freedom of speech. the parliament is open, the senate is open, the supreme court is working. imean... but, mr mandetta, you said the system is working. but in the meantime, thousands and thousands of brazilians are going to die of covid—19, and many will say they are dying unnecessarily, because of a failure of leadership at the top. surely that is reason enough to question whether bolsonaro should continue in office. yes, if we were in a parliamentary

political system, like you have there, probably that would solve in a political way. and brazil is not. we have elections each four years, and to have an impeachment, you really have to have a really well—documented crime, or something like that, and even have the vote for it. but what i think this is... for this time, it's not the best time to discuss that. we have a higher and very strong enemy to deal with, which is the coronavirus, in the brazilian society. and that's where all of our energy has to be. we will talk about politics later. now, we really need everybody to help. even you, from bbc, by doing this interview, is helping a lot, and i appreciate what you're doing. luiz henrique mandetta, i thank you very much indeed forjoining me from brasilia. thanks a lot. thank you, thank you.

very chilly out there at the moment. the cold weather which arrived on sunday is here to stay for the next few days. it's certainly not going to be warming up in a hurry. here's the cold front on the satellite picture, which swept across the uk. and behind it, cold airsurging in from the northern climes, all the way from the arctic, and spreading into other parts of europe through early monday as well. and, as i say, that is going to stick around for a few days. now, overall, monday is going to be a bright if not sunny day. but at times it will cloud over, and we are expecting some showers, particularly across scotland, and maybe one or two on the north sea coast.

and actually, through early monday, a few showers peppered around across yorkshire and the very far north of the uk, but predominantly it's clear. that's led to a frost across scotland, northern england, an air frost, and certainly a ground frost in southern parts of the uk, at least in a few areas. so monday gets off to a chilly but sunny start. the winds will be very brisk. you can see them blowing off the north sea there, on the yorkshire coast, east anglia and into the south—east. temperatures struggling — we should be closer to 17 in the south. we may not even make 12 degrees, and single figures on the north sea coast. now, here's tuesday's weather map. high pressure‘s with us. that does mean mostly dry weather, though not completely, because on the edge of this high pressure, there is this little mini cold front which is going to sweep in even colder weather temporarily into scotland. notice the blobs of blue there in scotland, and even some white there, indicating some wintry showers. so scotland on tuesday a very chilly day, with perhaps some sleet and snow moving across the highlands. 0nly five degrees in stornoway. to the south of that,

it won't be quite so cold. temperatures should make double figures, around 10—11. and mildest conditions there in the south—west of the uk, perhaps even 13 or 1a degrees. and then, on wednesday, again a couple of showers potentially affecting the north sea coast, but otherwise it's just broken cloud, some good sunny spells coming through, and temperatures still struggling, typically around say 10—12 degrees. just that slightly milder spot there in the south—west of the uk, perhaps 1a or 15. and the temperatures will gradually recover through the course of the week, perhaps making 16 or 17 by the time we get to friday, and maybe even 20 over the weekend. bye— bye.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm sally bundock. the british government announces a plan to end its lockdown, but there's disagreement from scotland, wales and northern ireland. we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures. workers in england are encouraged to return to work, but asked to avoid public transport. fanfares as disney reopens its shanghai theme park, but will a new spike in covid cases dampen the spirits? we're live from the city. and a small piece of good news from the pandemic: an absence of tourists