COVID-19: First case in Brazil was confirmed five years ago
Five years ago—on February 26, 2020—the first case of COVID-19 in Brazil was confirmed. A 61-year-old man who had recently flown back from Italy and had been receiving care for a couple of days at São Paulo’s Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein was confirmed to have the disease. He survived.
The Einstein team had been gearing up for a few days in São Paulo, just like the teams at other major hospitals in Brazil. At that point, virtually all health agents as well as society were already expecting the first case to appear. Any patient itted to the emergency department with flu-like symptoms was automatically suspected of having COVID-19.
When the first patient with symptoms of the disease came up, the suspicion was strong, particularly because he had returned from northern Italy, where the epidemic was already rampant. “That’s why the clinicians who saw him in the emergency room suspected the syndrome. A PCR test was requested for the specific identification of the SARS/Cov-2 virus, which only our laboratory was capable of performing back then,” said Dr. Cristóvão Mangueira, medical director of Einstein’s Clinical Laboratory.
The diagnosis team, Dr. Mangueira noted, had been preparing since the first cases was reported worldwide, in December 2019. The team was headed by Dr. João Renato Rebello Pinho, a clinical pathologist, and biologist Dr. Rúbia Santana, a researcher with a PhD in virology.
“At the time, there were no commercially produced tests for detecting COVID-19, so the only service available was at Einstein. We developed a test at the laboratory specially for this virus. It was based on a German technique known as the Charité protocol. The Germans had already sequenced the virus and described the PCR method, and we availed ourselves of the data to create our test,” Dr. Mangueira recounted.
The case was finally disclosed after other possibilities had been disregarded. The official notification to Brazilian health authorities was made on February 25, a Tuesday during Carnival, when revelers were swarming the streets of all main capitals.
The confirmation was made by the Ministry of Health in a press conference without social distancing measures or masks, on [Feb.] 26. In an official statement, then [Health] Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta guaranteed that “Brazilians would have all the necessary information for everyone to take their precautions—hygiene and respiratory etiquette, including washing their hands and faces with soap and water. This is an important hygienic habit to avoid not only respiratory diseases but also other oral diseases.” The measures proved ineffective a few weeks later.
From the first cases to the first waves
Worldwide, the first cases of the disease were recorded in December 2019 in China, when the government notified the World Health Organization (WHO) that there was a new, unidentified flu-like syndrome, with an outbreak of cases in the city of Wuhan, capital of the Hubei province. No details were given regarding how it was transmitted or where it had originated. The answer to the first question came in March the following year, when the disease was classified as a pandemic by the WHO. The answer to where it emerged is still unclear, even though the most accepted hypothesis is that it stemmed from contamination from exotic specimens in Wuhan’s central market.
Thus, quarantine was decreed in in Wuhan on January 23. About five hours earlier, in the early hours of the morning, the decision had been announced abroad on Chinese government social networks, including in English, and the movement of people entering and leaving the city was restricted. In Brazil, the news took at least two days to circulate and coincided with the Chinese travel ban for the Chinese New Year holiday—the week with the highest domestic traffic in the Asian country.
In Brazil, in addition to the patient treated in São Paulo, other cases came under investigation. “[Today,] 20 suspected cases of coronavirus infection are being monitored by the Ministry of Health in seven [Brazilian] states,” an official release dated February 26, 2020, reads. “Brazil,” the ministry’s statement goes on, “has ed in São Paulo its first case of coronavirus. In all, 59 suspected cases have been dismissed after laboratory tests.”
Then Minister Mandetta did not rule out the need for surveillance efforts, but backed down when the states began to discuss distancing measures. The Federal District adopted the first measures on March 11, followed in the following weeks by the main states.
The delay in federal decrees restricting circulation played a decisive role in spreading cases further inland. Approximately 700 thousand deaths were reported in Brazil during the Jair Bolsonaro istration.
According to a 2022 study by Thalyta Martins and Raphael Guimarães, “the COVID-19 pandemic exposed a crisis in Brazil’s federal government. The political instability assailing the country since 2015 was made even more chaotic by the government’s poorly coordinated management of the health crisis—dominated as it was by obstacles to intergovernmental collaboration, the poorly defined and overlapping duties of major officials, barriers to the integration and the execution of measures in a timely manner, the negligence of some state governments, and the dissemination of contradictory information.”
